State Rep. Phil King earns a “hero” tag for the second time in a week. The first time, he earned it by chopping about $100 million in fee hikes out of the Texas budget. This time, it’s for a shrewd maneuver to bypass the partisans in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. The whole article, which is behind a paywall at Texas-based Quorum Report, says King wants the state’s attorney general to take the redrawn district map straight to federal court, rather than deal with “exceptionally liberal” Department of Justice.
Rep. Phil King (R-Weatherford) is concerned that Texas’ redistricting maps won’t get a fair shake from President Obama’s Department of Justice. He says that’s because the staff lawyers in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division are “exceptionally liberal” and politically slanted.
His solution is to file legislation that would direct the Attorney General to bypass Obama’s DOJ and take this year’s redistricting maps to a three-judge panel from the District Court based in Washington, D.C., for preclearance review. King said that he observed what he viewed as a lack of objectivity at the DOJ in 2003 when he was in charge of submitting maps from the mid-decennial congressional redistricting undertaken by Republicans.
Since then, he’s collected a handful of rulings at the federal district court level where judges have criticized the DOJ’s preclearance work. For instance, he cites a Georgia redistricting case from 1994 where the court wrote that “the considerable influence of the ACLU advocacy on the voting rights decision of the United States Attorney General is an embarrassment.” King also cited a 1996 Louisiana case where the court wrote that “the Justice Department impermissibly encouraged – nay, mandated – racial gerrymandering.”
Our own J. Christian Adams has also recommended that Texas take its newly minted voter ID law, once Gov. Perry gets the final version and signs it, past the DOJ and straight to federal court, where it has a better chance of getting a fair hearing.
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