Here’s a story from the Fort Worth Report on the redistricting trial going on in El Paso, with a focus on the effect in Tarrant County.
Federal judges in El Paso are reviewing a lawsuit that alleges Texas redistricting architects racially discriminated against minority voters in drastically reshaping a Tarrant County-based state Senate district.
Under the 2021 redistricting plan by the Legislature, state Senate District 10, which had been based largely in southern Tarrant County, was stretched across a half-dozen counties to the west and south, with a resulting demographic shift to higher numbers of both white and Republican residents.
Beverly Powell, a Democrat who represented Senate District 10 at the time, joined then-Tarrant County Commissioner Roy Brooks and other North Texas plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the plan and later withdrew from seeking reelection in the face of likely defeat.
Nearly four years later, the Senate District 10 case is part of a consolidated group of redistricting challenges being heard before a three-judge panel. Designating Gov. Greg Abbott as the chief defendant, at least six major plaintiff groups are contesting electoral maps on the grounds that they ignored surging Latino growth in the last decade and diluted the influence of Blacks and Hispanics at the ballot box.
The trial started May 21.
[…]
Matt Angle, Texas political analyst and founder of the Democrat-aligned Lone Star Project, said the Senate District 10 redistricting is “by far” a dominant issue in the El Paso trial as the “most egregious violation of the Voting Rights Act.”
The plan retained parts of Tarrant County and neighboring Parker County, but stretched much of Senate District 10 out of the populous Fort Worth-Dallas region to include all of Brown, Callahan, Johnson, Palo Pinto, Shackelford and Stephens counties.
“They cracked apart all the minority areas of that district and packed them into areas that were largely white areas,” Powell told the Fort Worth Report, using terms associated with redistricting tactics. “And it’s a sad shame that they completely — what’s the word I’m looking for? — annihilated the voice of minorities across Senate District 10.”
Powell, now a special assistant to Texas Wesleyan University President Emily Messer, spent one term in the Senate and moved to Fort Worth about three years ago with her banker husband, Charlie Powell. In 2018, she defeated Sen. Konni Burton, a Republican, for the Senate District 10 seat.
After the 2021 redistricting, Powell declared the reelection race as “unwinnable” and withdrew, giving an opening to former Fort Worth policeman and long-time state Rep. Phil King of Weatherford, who was unopposed as the only Republican in the 2022 general election.
See here, here, here, and here for some background on the SD10 part of this, and here for more on the ongoing trial, for which I’ve seen basically no news since it began. I’d forgotten that SD10 was still part of this, because once there was no temporary restraining order to prevent the new district from being used in the primary, it was already a loss from the Democratic perspective. Even with a win and an eventual opportunity to take SD10 back, the best case scenario is probably the 2028 election, meaning that it would have been illegally drawn for Republicans for nearly the entire decade. Pretty good deal for the lawbreakers, if indeed they are ruled to have broken the law. Needless to say, SCOTUS has done a lot to stack the odds in their favor.