By Eleanor Klibanoff
...Tony Campos died in 2023, (click here) the year before his case was overturned and two years before the Texas Legislature cited that new court precedent as Republicans positioned themselves to grab as many as five new seats.
“It was painful to see my dad’s name in the news, for the wrong reasons,” said Marc, a longtime political consultant for Houston-area Democrats. “He was having memory issues the last few years, but he always remembered that suit.”
Forty miles away, Mark Henry watched the same proceedings and saw a very different story. As Galveston County judge, Henry helped overturn Campos’ ruling, getting the same court to approve of his dismantling of the county’s one majority non-white district, and rule that “coalition districts” couldn’t be allowed as a remedy to discriminatory maps.
This sharp reversal of four decades of court precedent was a seismic shift in voting rights, as celebrated in conservative legal circles as it was vilified in liberal ones. It will now be harder to challenge new voting maps in court, especially in multiracial urban areas where no one racial group dominates, and opens the door to redraw diverse, Democratic-leaning districts previously sanctioned by the courts....
