Texas lawmakers have said the new map was not drawn to target minorities’ voting power.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on Aug. 26 filed a motion seeking to block Texas’s newly enacted congressional map, arguing it “intentionally discriminates based on race.”
The NAACP filed the motion for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in El Paso, as part of a lawsuit that names the Texas governor and the Texas secretary of state as defendants.
The motion is an amendment to a lawsuit against Texas that the NAACP filed in 2021 to challenge congressional maps drawn after the 2020 census. The original complaint had said that redistricting plans were drawn by legislators and adopted “for the express purpose of permissibly discriminating against voters of color” in violation of the U.S. Constitution and Voting Rights Act.
The Republican-majority Texas Senate passed the new congressional map into law in a party-line vote in the early morning of Aug. 23. Texas’s Republican-majority House of Representatives had approved the redrawn map in an Aug. 20 vote.
Republicans currently control 25 of the state’s 38 U.S. House seats. Republicans could increase their presence in the state’s U.S. House delegation by as many as five seats.
NAACP’s CEO and president, Derrick Johnson, said in a statement that the state of Texas is 40 percent white but that “white voters control over 73 percent of the state’s congressional seats.”
“It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated,” Johnson said. “The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”
Texas lawmakers have said the new map was not drawn to target minorities’ voting power.
State Sen. Phil King, a Republican, said on Aug. 25 that he only considered political performance when crafting the map.
