Votelaw, Edward Still's blog on law and politics

Dallas Morning News reports,

LAREDO – The holdout Democrats from Texas came home Wednesday, arriving on friendly turf to rally in advance of an expected, less-sympathetic reception in Austin next week.

"It's good to be home! Viva Laredo!" Sen. Judith Zaffirini told a hometown crowd gathered in an airplane hangar, moments after a school band and drill team heralded the returning senators with a thumping toreador march. "I can't tell you how many sacrifices the senators you see today have made."

The senators chose to make Laredo their point of entry partly because it is a Democratic stronghold and Ms. Zaffirini's hometown. But they also came to attend a federal court hearing Thursday in their suit that contends that the GOP-backed redistricting effort violates the Voting Rights Act.

And again, why is this fight important? Jean Damu answers the question in this essay linking the Texas fight with Proposition 54 in California:

Now Texas is on the verge of becoming the nation’s second non-white majority state.

Thanks to Michelle Goldberg’s excellent article, “The Texas Stalemate: It’s All About Race,” we know that the Texas state senators, holed up in a New Mexico hotel, are attempting to fight off a redistricting power grab by right wing Republicans that effectively would un-empower Black and Hispanic voters.

All of the Texas legislators hiding out in New Mexico are either Black or Hispanic, with the exception of one white.

The fugitive Texans say their protest is not a political quarrel but rather a civil rights struggle that harkens back to days of Jim Crow segregation. They say their struggle is to preserve Black and Latino political voting power that is commensurate with their numbers.

Republicans, however, are attempting to redistrict Texas, something that normally happens only once every 10 years, in a way that would dilute Black and Latino voters and separate them from their white allies. They would do this by merging mostly Black and Latino districts into overwhelmingly white districts.

In California, the Racial Privacy Initiative is not seen as a specific means by which white political power would be preserved, because it would not affect the U.S. Census Bureau nor conceivably would it affect redistricting, at this time.

Down the road, however, if Prop 54, the Racial Privacy Initiative, passes, then the colorblind movement would begin to swell, as the anti-affirmative action movement has. Eventually, the real intention of the Racial Privacy Initiative, the preservation of white supremacy, would be clear for all to see.