WASHINGTON – The House Democratic leader wants an independent inquiry into the Justice Department’s decision to approve a Texas redistricting plan that staff lawyers concluded diluted minority voting rights.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the decision by senior officials to ignore the staff lawyers’ conclusions – contained in a 73-page memo made public on Friday – was political.
“There must be an independent inquiry into the contemptible politicization of the Justice Department to rubber-stamp congressman Tom DeLay’s illegal redistricting scheme in Texas,” Pelosi said.
The plan was pushed through the state legislature by DeLay, R-Texas, to help elect more Republicans to the House when he was the chamber’s GOP leader. It was approved in time for the 2004 elections.
Because of historic discrimination against minority voters, Texas is required under provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to get Justice Department approval for any voting changes, to ensure they don’t undercut minority voting.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was not in that post when the plan was approved, defended the department’s decision. The senior officials who approved it were “confirmed by the Senate to exercise their own independent judgment,” and their disagreement with other agency employees doesn’t mean the final decision was wrong, he said.
The decision appears to have been correct, Gonzales said, because a three-judge federal panel upheld the plan, and Texas has since elected one additional black congressman.
Of the state’s 32 House seats, Republicans held 15 before the 2004 elections. Under the DeLay-backed plan, Republicans were elected to 21 of the state’s seats in the House. Six delegation members are Hispanic and three are black.
The redistricting plan has been challenged in court by Democrats and minority voting groups that claim it is unconstitutional and that district boundaries were illegally manipulated to give one party an unfair advantage. The Supreme Court is considering whether to review the case.
The memo released Friday by a Democratic group, Lone Star Project, had been sought by lawsuit plaintiffs before going to court, but the Justice Department declined to surrender it then.
Eight department staffers, including the heads of the Voting Rights Division, objected to the redistricting map, according to the memo first reported Friday by The Washington Post.
The Justice Department said Sheldon Bradshaw, then principal deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, made the final decision in the Texas case.
The plan was approved by the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature in special session in 2003 after Democratic lawmakers fled the state capital in an effort to block votes on the new congressional boundaries.
The redistricting plan is connected to Texas indictments of DeLay on charges of conspiracy and money laundering. A judge is expected to decide by Tuesday whether to dismiss the charges that forced DeLay to relinquish his House majority leader post in September.
DeLay and two people who oversaw his fund-raising activities are accused of funneling prohibited corporate political money through the national Republican Party to state GOP legislative candidates. Texas law prohibits spending corporate money on the election or defeat of a candidate.
Several of the DeLay-backed candidates won election, giving Republicans a majority in the state House in 2003, when the congressional redistricting process began.
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