TEXAS REDISTRICTING TO BE REVIEWED

Oh happy day.

Also, as I posted earlier Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said last week that he is considering holding hearings on the Texas redistricting case.

For those of us Texas Democrats who lived through the rancorous, frustrating days around the redistricting battle, this is music to our ears. It's not news to us that Tom DeLay engineered the whole thing, that government agencies such as Homeland Security were misused during the fray, that Speaker Tom Craddick tried to use the Department of Public Safety to track down Democratic legislators, that certain long-term Democrat Congressmen (such as Martin Frost, Charlie Stenholm and Chris Bell) were deliberately targeted for extinction, that the Republican redistricting map created crazy-quilt districts in order to marginalize minority voters.

Let's hope the SCOTUS takes a look before Alito takes a seat.

UPDATE: The Dallas Morning News has a good synopsis of the issues involved and the history of the SCOTUS's outlook.

Tags: Texas redistricting, Supreme Court