Perry v. Perez
The Supreme Court threw out a set of temporary Texas election maps drawn by a lower federal court, ruling that the court had strayed too far from the maps the Texas Legislature had just passed instead of using them as a starting point.
The decision sets ground rules for how courts should handle redistricting when a state's new maps are stuck waiting for federal civil-rights approval: judges should stick close to the legislature's plan unless there's a real legal problem with specific parts of it, not redraw districts from scratch based on their own idea of fairness.
“On the contrary, the state plan serves as a starting point for the district court.”
The Court's central instruction that legislature-drawn maps should guide interim court maps.
How it got here: A federal preclearance court in D.C. had not yet ruled on Texas's new maps when a separate Texas federal court drew interim election maps, prompting Texas's direct appeal to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
After the 2010 census, Texas gained four congressional seats and had to redraw its congressional, state senate, and state house districts. Texas passed new maps, but they were challenged both by the Justice Department's preclearance process and by voters and civil rights groups claiming the maps discriminated against Latino and Black residents in violation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.
The question before the Court
When a federal court has to draw temporary election maps for Texas because the state's new maps aren't yet cleared under federal law, how much should it follow the state legislature's own map?
Why it matters
Texas voters faced the real possibility of voting under maps a federal court invented largely on its own, rather than maps reflecting choices made by elected state lawmakers. The ruling affects how courts nationwide handle redistricting disputes whenever a new state map is challenged in court but hasn't yet been cleared, keeping legislatures' policy choices in the driver's seat unless a specific district is legally suspect.
What changes now
The case returns to the federal district court in Texas, which must redraw interim maps for the 2012 elections using the state's enacted plan as its guide, departing from it only where a specific challenge has a reasonable chance of success. The underlying constitutional and Voting Rights Act challenges to Texas's permanent maps continue separately, as does the preclearance proceeding in Washington, D.C. This is not a final ruling on whether Texas's maps are lawful.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Texas's newly enacted maps actually violate the Constitution, Section 2, or Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. It only set the standard lower courts must use when drawing temporary maps while those legal challenges remain unresolved.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
“§5 is unconstitutional.”Thomas's view that the federal preclearance requirement itself violates the Constitution.
Justice Thomas agreed with vacating the interim maps but for a different reason: he believes Section 5's preclearance requirement is unconstitutional, so Texas's failure to get preclearance should not have blocked its new maps at all. Since the new maps had not been found to violate any law, he would have let Texas's own maps govern the elections and sent the case back only to resolve the constitutional and Section 2 claims.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court explained that when a state's newly enacted redistricting plan cannot yet be used because it lacks federal preclearance (an approval process then required under the Voting Rights Act for certain states with histories of discrimination), a court drawing temporary maps should still treat the new state plan as a starting point rather than ignoring it.
- The Court reasoned that redistricting is fundamentally a policy exercise assigned to elected legislatures, so a court forced to draw interim maps should borrow the legislature's line-drawing choices except where those choices are legally flawed.
- Applying a probability standard, the Court held that a district court may depart from the state's map only where a challenge to a specific part of the map has a reasonable probability of succeeding under the Constitution, the Voting Rights Act's Section 2 (which bars racially discriminatory voting rules), or Section 5 (the preclearance requirement) — not merely because the map as a whole is being challenged.
- The Court reviewed the Texas district court's interim maps and found that in several places — such as adjusting district lines for minor population differences, refusing to split voting precincts, redrawing an individual district, and possibly designing a district to combine two minority groups into a voting majority — the lower court departed from the state's plan without pointing to a likely legal defect justifying the change.
- Because it could not tell whether the district court had properly limited itself to fixing only the parts of the state's map with real legal problems, the Court concluded the interim maps could not stand as drawn.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Upham v. Seamon (456 U. S. 37)
Reaffirmed that courts must defer to unobjectionable parts of a state's map even if the whole plan lacks preclearance.
Reaffirms Abrams v. Johnson (521 U. S. 74)
Reaffirmed that courts should follow a state's legislative policies when drawing court-ordered maps.