U.S. Supreme Court, No. 05-276
The NAACP Legal Department participated in the review and approval of three Amicus Briefs filed by the Texas State Conference NAACP, Ft. Worth NAACP, and North Carolina State Conference NAACP filed with the U.S. Supreme Court regarding three questions being heard by the Supreme Court on appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.
The questions presented include:
1) Whether the Equal Protection Clause and the 1st Amendment prohibit States from redrawing lawful districting plans in the middle of the decade, for the sole purpose of maximizing partisan advantage;
2) Whether Section 2 of the VRA permits a State to destroy a district effectively controlled by African American voters, merely because it is impossible to draw a district in which African-Americans constitute an absolute mathematical majority of the population;
and 3) Whether, under Bush v. Vera, 517 U.S. 952 (1996), a bizarre looking congressional district, which was intentionally drawn as a majority-Latino district by connecting two far-flung pockets of dense urban population with a 300-mile-long rural "land bridge," may escape invalidation as a racial gerrymander because drawing a compact majority-Latino district would have required the mapmakers to compromise their political goal of maximizing Republican seats elsewhere in the State.
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