. . . at the Houston firm of Sweeney, Cohen, Wilburn, Jetton, Newkirk, Langworthy, Fleck & Gray.
In today's otherwise forgettable editorial ramble through GOP presidential politics -- "arguably, Romney has seized the momentum . . . ." -- the Clever Ones at the Chronicle said:
As we know, Texas has been pushed out of Super Tuesday thanks to faults in our state's redistricting plan found by the U.S. Supreme Court.
(Editorial, "Romney, Gingrich and primary math," Houston Chronicle, February 2, 2012)
"As we know" should be "as we wish."
The Supreme Court has "found" nothing about Texas's current redistricting plans. What it has done, in an unsigned opinion of January 20, is vacate the court-imposed pro-Democrat redistricting plan the Chronicle supported and order a three-judge federal panel in San Antonio to do it over and do it right this time.
You can read the opinion yourself, but these snippets should give the flavor of where the high court found "faults" (emphasis added):
To the extent the District Court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of "the collective public good" for the Texas Legislature's determination of which policies serve "the interests of the citizens of Texas," the court erred.
The District Court also erred in refusing to split voting precincts . . . .
The District Court also appears to have unnecessarily ignored the State's plan in drawing certain individual districts.
The court's approach in drawing other districts was unclear.
Because it is unclear whether the District Court for the Western District of Texas followed the appropriate standards in drawing interim maps for the 2012 Texas elections, the orders implementing those maps are vacated, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Nothing in that opinion -- or any other Supreme Court opinion the Chronicle may wish to cite -- supports the proposition that the Supreme Court found a single "fault" in the Texas legislature's redistricting plans, much less "faults." This may happen, but it hasn't happened yet. (More precisely, for what it's worth, the "finding" would come from a lower court and be upheld by the high court.)
Why does the Chronicle make foolish errors like this, again and again? In part because it has not a single conservative on its editorial board to point out the errors before they're published.
Another part -- a large part -- it is that editorials are not well-edited. A good editor might well have remembered this line from a previous editorial on the subject:
The other part of the blame [for delaying Texas elections] lies with the [San Antonio district court], which went too far in the other direction, drawing a unanimous rebuke from the nine-member U.S. Supreme Court.
"Unanimous rebuke" is right; the Supreme Court's finding "faults" is wrong.
How do we know the Chronicle's editorial board is cleverer than you and I? Because we, unlike they, are handicapped by the inability to hold two contradictory views of reality at the same time.
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