00:00Chair, I recognize Mr. Martinez-Fisher.
00:04Thank you, Mr. Speaker and members.
00:05Members, I've been listening to the debate.
00:07I've seen redistricting four times on this floor,
00:10and this is the first one I've ever seen
00:12where we stopped talking about things
00:14that the court has told us to talk about.
00:17This seems to be just a debate
00:19about red shirts versus blue shirts,
00:23and that is not how this process works.
00:25Yeah, there was a court case that said,
00:27hey, by the way, if you want to consider political outcomes,
00:31that's fair, but that's not the only thing to consider.
00:35I have not yet heard once
00:37a single member talk about communities of interest,
00:42what we all know about,
00:44neighborhood associations, church parishes,
00:47PTA districts, civic clubs in Houston.
00:53These are the things that folks think together.
00:56They work together.
00:57They're aligned,
00:59and they want those aligned interests
01:00represented in the halls of Congress.
01:04I quit counting on this map,
01:06but the last time I checked,
01:07there are over 488 precinct splits.
01:11Those don't happen by accident.
01:14When you start splitting precincts,
01:16you're not doing it
01:17because you have to get to a rounding error.
01:19You're doing it to design an outcome,
01:21and so given the track record that we have here in this state,
01:26we argued about the Ten Commandments law.
01:29You said it was going to work.
01:30A court just set it aside.
01:33A few years ago,
01:34we told you that the show me your papers legislation
01:37was going to be found invalid by the courts.
01:41You ignored it.
01:42Courts have put that on hold mostly.
01:45Book bans, transgender rights.
01:48We get to the courthouse.
01:49They apply the rules,
01:51and these proposals go nowhere.
01:53So given the timeline about mid-decade redistricting,
01:58given the stakes and what could happen,
02:01nobody's talking about the communities
02:05that are going to be impacted by these districts,
02:07and if you look at them,
02:09there are a lot of them
02:09that are African American and Latino,
02:11especially in my part of the state.
02:13So I wanted to make this one really easy.
02:16I've heard a lot about the Petaway decision.
02:18I've heard nothing about the Jingles decision.
02:22I've heard nothing about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,
02:25which we know still works
02:27because in Louisiana,
02:28they just applied it last week in a Fifth Circuit ruling.
02:31So all this amendment is pretty simple.
02:33It just says that whatever we do here,
02:36we're still following.
02:37Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,
02:40which is the only enforceable section
02:43that we've used that's still in effect
02:46and still something that we strive to use
02:50and is still the law that's applied in this country.
02:53So it's pretty simple.
02:55We oftentimes argue about whether or not
02:57we're intending to hurt people.
02:59Well, this is one of these votes
03:00that if you vote against it,
03:01then I'd want to know
03:02why would you vote against
03:04the United States Supreme Court
03:06currently held decision
03:08and valid piece of the current Voting Rights Act,
03:12which is Section 2.
03:13So that's really all it does.
03:14No trick here.
03:15It's just we're going to apply
03:16Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,
03:18and I hope it's acceptable to the author.
03:20Thank you, sir.
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