As Texas lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map this summer, Marc Campos’ mind was on his father.
In 1987, Tony Campos sued the city of Baytown in a landmark case that opened the door for Black and Hispanic voters to join together to bring voting rights challenges across the country.
It was his proudest accomplishment, next to having a family and flying behind enemy lines in World War II, Marc said.
Tony Campos died in 2023, the year before his case was overturned and two years before the Texas Legislature cited that new court precedent as they grabbed as many as five new seats for the GOP.
“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.
But the ruling didn’t get widespread attention until this summer, when the U.S. Department of Justice, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and some Republican lawmakers cited it as their motivation for overhauling the state’s congressional map amid pressure from President Donald Trump.
Henry, a Republican who said he has wanted to take down the “legal fiction” of coalition districts for years, watched gleefully as the case he was involved in was used to bolster his party's grip on Congress.
“I tell people, I've gotten more Republicans into the House of Representatives than the [National Republican Congressional Committee] ever has,” he told The Texas Tribune. “I’m thrilled we had a chance to change the shape of the U.S. House.”
The Baytown precedent
Marc Campos was a kid the first time his dad ran for Baytown City Council. The city in east Harris County, known for its oil refineries and petrochemical plants, was rapidly growing and rapidly diversifying, and Tony Campos wanted a chance to represent his neighbors.
“I remember he printed up signs and little handout cards,” Marc said. “He got his ass kicked.”
But Campos ran again, and again, and again. Every single time, he — and other Hispanic candidates — lost to white candidates vying for Baytown’s at-large council seats, each of which were elected citywide.
In the mid-1980s, Black and Hispanic residents together made up a quarter of the voters in Baytown. They tended to select the same candidates as each other, but different candidates than their white neighbors, analysis showed. Campos and other Black and Hispanic community leaders felt that 25% of the population should have been able to select their candidate of choice for at least one of Baytown’s six city council seats.
The Supreme Court had just recently ruled, in 1986, that North Carolina’s at-large system violated the Voting Rights Act by “submerging” Black votes in majority-white areas. Some wanted to challenge Baytown’s system on the same grounds.
In that North Carolina ruling, the justices had laid out a clear test for who could bring claims under the Voting Rights Act. A group had to be “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district.” They also had to vote cohesively with each other, and differently than the majority, the court ruled.
While the North Carolina case was about Black voters alone, Baytown’s lawsuit was on behalf of Black and Hispanic voters combined. Campos, the perennial candidate, was selected as the plaintiff.
“He knew he was taking on the city establishment in Baytown,” his son said. “But he also knew he had the law, the Voting Rights Act, on his side.”
U.S. District Judge John Singleton agreed, directing Baytown to draw single-member districts, one of which should be “more than 50% minority, combined Black and Hispanic.”
The city appealed, but a three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Campos, finding “there is nothing in the law that prevents the plaintiffs from identifying the protected aggrieved minority to include both Blacks and Hispanics.”
This ruling, the first of any appeals court on the issue, opened the door for multiple racial groups to band together to bring voting rights lawsuits, and for the courts to remedy these violations with “coalition districts,” as they became known.
Marc Campos points to his father, Tony Campos, in a photo with then-state Sen. John Whitmire. “He knew he was taking on the city establishment in Baytown,” Marc said of his father’s legal challenge. “But he also knew he had the law, the Voting Rights Act, on his side.” For Campos, this was an unparalleled victory, especially once the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. He decided not to run for one of the newly created seats, ceding to the new generation, but his role in getting those lines drawn on the map wasn’t forgotten. Over the years, people would stop him at the grocery store or out at events to thank him for putting his name on the lawsuit, his son said.
“It became a different Baytown, politically, after that,” Marc Campos said. “It opened the door to so many other people, different leaders, different agendas, trying to solve different problems.”
Other cities and counties got rid of their at-large systems, and Black and Hispanic voters began banding together to bring voting rights lawsuits in other areas. While 5th Circuit precedent only governs Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, other circuits adopted the same legal interpretation.
“It has never been easy to bring a coalition claim because of the type of evidence of cohesion needed,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, a voting rights attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “But in situations where different groups are suffering a really similar type of harm, because the majority group is discriminating against them and is not permitting them to exercise their equal right to vote, then there needs to be a way to remedy that type of discrimination.”
Not everyone was happy with the Baytown ruling, even within the court itself. Judge Patrick Higginbotham, a Reagan appointee, criticized his colleagues in a dissent for extending protections of the Voting Rights Act to “a newly defined minority — a coalition of Blacks and Browns.”
“This is a disturbing reading of a uniquely important statute, and one with the potential to affect the very structure of every school district, county, and city government in most states of this nation,” he said.
Higginbotham wrote for a six-judge conservative minority that was outnumbered on a court known as a crusader for Civil Rights in the post-Jim Crow South.
But a change was slowly coming, to the 5th Circuit and the Supreme Court, that would imperil Campos’ victory and once again rewrite voting rights law.
The Galveston pivot
In Henry’s book, Higginbotham got it right. The Galveston County executive would have dismantled Precinct 3, the county’s one coalition district, years ago if he could have.
But the Department of Justice wouldn’t let him. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required states and localities with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices to get their maps preapproved by the feds. When the county tried to redraw Precinct 3 in 2011, Henry’s first redistricting cycle, the DOJ stepped in and stopped them.
But just two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court sharply curtailed Section 5, releasing Texas and its political subdivisions, including Galveston County, from these preclearance requirements.
“If that had not been struck down by the Supreme Court, I suspect they would have forced me to once again create a coalition district,” he said. “I don’t know that my hands would have been anything other than tied.”
In 2021, over protests from the court’s one Black commissioner, as well as Black and Hispanic residents, the commissioners court approved a map that eviscerated Precinct 3, scattering its residents of color throughout the three other majority white precincts. A group of plaintiffs sued, and the Department of Justice joined them, the only county that the feds sued over their 2021 maps.
Galveston County Judge Mark Henry seated in the Galveston County North Court Annex on Oct. 21, 2025, in League City. As Galveston County executive, Henry helped overturn Campos’ ruling, getting the same federal 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. The plaintiffs knew that Galveston officials, and the national Republican groups backing them, wanted to use this case to take aim at coalition districts, Chen said.
“But we still couldn't let such grave, blatant injustice stand without a legal fight,” she said. “The facts and law were very clear, which is why the Black and Latino plaintiffs, including our plaintiffs, prevailed at the district court.”
Judge Jeff Brown, a Trump appointee, ruled that the map was “stark and jarring,” and “fundamentally inconsistent with [Section] 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”
Henry wasn’t worried.
“We had to lose at the trial court,” Henry said. “There’s no way [Judge] Brown can overrule precedent set by the 5th Circuit.”
At the 5th Circuit, a three-judge panel — led by Edith Jones, who had joined Higginbotham in dissent in the 1980s — ruled that while the Baytown case established the validity of coalition claims, “the court’s decisions in this respect are wrong as a matter of law.” They sent the case to be heard by the full 5th Circuit.
The Department of Justice tried to settle the case at that point, Henry said, but he convinced the other commissioners to hold the line.
In August 2024, the 5th Circuit overturned the Baytown decision, reversing 37 years of its own precedent.
“Nowhere does Section 2 indicate that two minority groups may combine forces to pursue a vote dilution claim,” the ruling said. “On the contrary, the statute identifies the subject of a vote dilution claim as ‘a class,’ in the singular, not the plural.”
Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee, dissented on behalf of five judges. Like Higginbotham nearly four decades earlier, she was unrestrained in her vociferous disagreement with the majority’s opinion.
“Today, the majority finally dismantled the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in this circuit, leaving four decades of en banc precedent flattened in its wake,” she wrote, accusing her fellow judges of “jumping through hoops” to reach their conclusions.
Henry was glad to be allowed to use their new maps. But he was even more thrilled about what this meant for redistricting nationwide. The case cost the county about $5 million in legal fees, although Henry said he’s in talks with Sen. Mayes Middleton to get the state to foot the bill.
“It’s truly unfair for the citizens of Galveston County to have to pay for that benefit to the entire nation,” he said.
Middleton did not respond to a request for comment.
Implications for 2025 and beyond
Marc Campos watched this case closely, more concerned about the political implications than the familial ones. Now a political consultant in Houston who works with many Hispanic candidates, Campos knew some Republican lawmakers would now be taking a closer look at the state’s many majority non-white districts.
But he and many others assumed they had time to sort through the implications — lawmakers weren’t expected to redraw Texas’ maps until after the 2030 census.
But then, just as the 2025 legislative session was wrapping up, President Donald Trump began pressuring Texas to redraw its congressional map to add up to five more GOP seats.
As part of that pressure campaign, the DOJ sent Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton a letter, alerting them that four of their existing congressional districts were unconstitutional coalition districts.
“Although the State’s interest when configuring these districts was to comply with Fifth Circuit precedent prior to the 2024 Petteway decision, that interest no longer exists,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote, citing the Galveston decision. “Post-Petteway, the Congressional Districts at issue are nothing more than vestiges of an unconstitutional racially based gerrymandering past, which must be abandoned.”
Abbott asked lawmakers to take up redistricting during an overtime legislative session “in light of constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice.” He said in several television interviews that the Petteway ruling was the impetus for the redraw, noting that “we want to make sure that we have maps that don’t impose coalition districts.”
Months later, when the new congressional map went before a trio of federal judges in El Paso, the state eschewed the Petteway case as the justification, saying it was purely done for partisan gain, which the U.S. Supreme Court has sanctioned.
Judge Jeff Brown, who initially ruled on the Petteway case, is one of the three judges reviewing Texas’ maps, alongside 5th Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee who joined Jones in the majority when Petteway came before the appeals court. Judge David Guaderrama, an Obama appointee, is the third judge.
Legal experts told the Tribune that this letter reflects a misunderstanding of the Petteway ruling, and that even post-Petteway, dismantling majority non-white districts on the explicit basis of their racial makeup could constitute a separate violation of the Constitution and Voting Rights Act.
“Nothing in this decision suggests, much less holds, that the VRA prohibits the very existence of coalition districts,” Ellen Katz, a redistricting expert at the University of Michigan Law School, told the Texas House’s redistricting committee at its first hearing on the new map. “There are hundreds of these districts nationwide in which jurisdictions relying on traditional principles create these districts.”
The Galveston County North Court Annex on Oct. 21, 2025, in League City, where county officials passed a map after the 2020 census that dismantled the county’s one “coalition” commissioner precinct. Whether or not Texas’ sudden redraw of its map was actually precipitated by the Petteway ruling, its role in the redistricting saga is a sign of how impactful the new precedent will be the next time states and counties undertake redistricting en masse in 2031, when lawmakers will be free to craft new boundaries without threat of coalition-based challenges. Already, Tarrant County and Fort Bend County have undertaken mid-decade redistricting, eliminating majority non-white commissioner precincts in the process.
To Campos, it’s not surprising that many of these high-profile redistricting cases come out of the diverse melting pot that is the Texas Gulf Coast, where battles over race and representation go back to long before the Voting Rights Act was in place.
“It’s our neighbors in Galveston, just up Highway 146, that’s taking away what we won in Baytown, and that’s really the only reason what is happening in Fort Bend County as we speak is happening,” he said. “It’s a power grab, pure and simple.”
Other appellate courts still recognize coalition districts, meaning this issue is almost inevitably going to end up before the Supreme Court. Before that, though, the high court is expected to rule this year in a Louisiana case that could strip most of the protections voters of color were guaranteed under the Voting Rights Act.
If the high court removes those guardrails, this summer shows that Texas, and some of its counties, will likely consider swiftly revisiting their existing maps to further strengthen Republican majorities.
“What is normal now was inconceivable four months ago, to see states all across the country rushing to redistrict and throw their elections into disarray,” Chen said.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
