Michael Li's take on redistricting

Li has done great work.

The crux of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's court argument has been that the only districts protected under the Voting Rights Act are districts where, unlike Senate District 10, a single minority group, by itself, controls outcomes in elections. In other words, in his view, Hispanic and African-American voters only get protected by the Voting Rights Act if they live in neatly defined ethnic barrios of the type that are becoming more and more rare in a multi-ethnic Texas.

Abbott's argument is a one-two power grab. On the one hand, the state argues it can't draw more African-American or Hispanic seats because the populations are too spread out across the region. Then it argues that it can fracture the coalitions that minority groups manage to forge because "coalitions" aren't protected by voting rights laws.