WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday threw out a lower court's interim maps for voting districts in Texas, saying the judges should have been guided more by the maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature.  The high court sent the closely watched Texas voting-rights case back to the judges in San Antonio for further proceedings. The unsigned opinion, issued just 11 days after oral arguments, appeared to be a compromise among the justices as the Texas primary elections neared.  Their decision stressed that judges drawing new voting districts must take their lead from a state legislature yet "take care not to incorporate into any interim plan any legal defects in the state plan." Advocates for Latino and African-American voters had sued the state, saying the Legislature's voting districts discriminated against minorities and would dilute their power at the polls.  Friday's ruling lays out standards for new voting districts and also acknowledges that a separate hearing underway in Washington, D.C., on the Texas maps would likely impact the maps to be used in the state's upcoming primary elections.  Texas is one of nine mostly Southern states covered by a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that requires places with a history of discrimination to show in advance that election-law changes would not hurt minorities. A panel in Washington is now engaged in that pre-clearance process.  Friday's case was not a constitutional challenge to the pre-clearance provision but arose against a backdrop of such challenges by other states and localities in lower courts.  The justices' opinion Friday did not offer any clear signals on how they would ultimately rule on the part of the landmark Voting Rights Act known as Section 5.  The Court's decision did not fully vindicate either side. The justices reaffirmed the principle that requires changes in voting maps or electoral procedures in certain states to be screened by federal authorities. Yet the decision in Perry v. Perez dictates that judges defer to considerable degree to elected legislators when courts intervene before preclearance.  Lawyers on both sides tried to claim a measure of victory.  Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said, "The Supreme Court confirmed that the San Antonio court drew illegal maps, without regard for the policy decisions of elected leaders. As the justices point out, courts are ill-suited to make policy judgments and redistricting is primarily the responsibility of the state."  Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), said, "The Supreme Court has yet again reaffirmed Texas' obligation to comply with the Voting Rights Act (VRA). (ellipses) Regrettably, the state's obstinate refusal to recognize Latino voting rights will require yet further court proceedings to secure VRA compliance."  Friday's dispute traced to a surge in Texas' population, particularly among Latinos, between 2000 and 2010. The population growth will give the state four more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives this year, for a total 36.  The state Legislature drew new voting-district maps for the state Senate and House and for the U.S. House of Representatives. Yet, despite the growth in minority population, the Legislature's new maps reduced so-called minority opportunity districts, leading the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, MALDEF and other minority-rights groups to sue state officials in federal court.  In that San Antonio action, the challengers filed under the Voting Rights Act's Section 2, which bars procedures that deny voting rights on account of race or color.  The San Antonio-based federal court, saying it needed to act quickly because of Texas' March 6 scheduled primary, blocked the Legislature's new voting-district maps, saying they could not be used until they had been cleared. (Texas' primary has since been pushed back to April 3.)  In voiding the court-drawn maps Friday, the justices said the court must be guided by the state Legislature's map, although it has yet to be approved.  "Section 5 prevents a state plan from being implemented if it has not been precleared," the ruling said. "But that does not mean that the plan is of no account or that the policy judgments it reflects can be disregarded by a district court drawing an interim plan. On the contrary, the state plan served as a starting point for the district court."  The justices emphasized that a lower court must not substitute its own views. "To the extent the district court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of the collective public good for the Texas Legislature's determination of which policies serve the interests of the citizens of Texas, the court erred," the Supreme Court wrote.  The justices, in their rare Friday opinion, said that "because it is unclear whether the district court for the western district of Texas followed the appropriate standards in drawing interim maps for the 2012 Texas elections, the orders implementing those maps are vacated."  Justice Clarence Thomas joined the judgment of the court but wrote a separate statement saying that the Texas Legislature's maps should have been fully enforced even though they had not been screened by federal officials to ensure they did not discriminate.
The nation's top court has thrown out electoral maps drawn by federal judges in Texas that favored minorities.