Lloyd Doggett

The decision turned on the fact that the 23rd was a protected majority-Latino district—in other words, if the 23rd was ever redrawn to put Latinos in a minority, an acceptable majority-Latino district had to be created in its place.

While the new 23rd was 55% Latino, only 46% of its voting population was Latino.

The Court therefore found that the 23rd was not an acceptable Latino-majority district.

Due to the 23rd's size, the ruling forced the redrawing of five districts between El Paso and San Antonio, including the 25th.

Most of his former territory wound up on the 25th district, which consisted of a long tendril stretching from Austin to McAllen on the Mexican border.

It was called "the fajita strip" or "the bacon strip" because of its shape.

Doggett moved to the newly configured 25th and entered the Democratic primary—the real contest in the heavily Democratic, majority-Hispanic district.

He won the primary and the general election.

It also found that the 25th was not compact enough to be an acceptable replacement because the two Latino communities in the district were more than 300 miles apart, creating the impression that it had been deliberately drawn to pick up as many Latinos as possible without regard to compactness.

Lloyd Alton Doggett II (born October 6, 1946) is an American attorney and politician who is a U.S. representative from Texas.

Doggett served as a member of the Texas Senate from 1973 to 1985.

He gained attention in 1979 as a member of the "Killer Bees", a group of 12 Democratic state senators who opposed a plan to move the state's presidential primary to March 11.

The intent was to give former governor John Connally a leg up on the 1980 Republican nomination.

The Killer Bees wanted a closed primary.

When this proposal was rejected, they walked out of the chamber and left the Senate two members short of a quorum.

The bill was withdrawn five days later.

He was the Democratic nominee for the 1984 United States Senate election in Texas, losing to the Republican candidate, U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, by a wide margin.

Doggett authored the bill creating the Texas Commission on Human Rights, as well as a law outlawing cop killer bullets and a sunset law requiring periodic review of government agencies.

In 1989, Doggett became both an Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

Doggett was elected to the House of Representatives in 1994 in what was then the 10th district after 32-year incumbent Jake Pickle retired.

He was one of the few Democrats to win an open seat in that year's massive Republican landslide.

A member of the Democratic Party, he has represented a district based in Austin since 1995, currently numbered as Texas's 37th congressional district.

Doggett was previously a member of the Texas State Senate and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

Doggett and fellow representative Sheila Jackson Lee became co-deans of the Texas's congressional delegation after Eddie Bernice Johnson retired.

Doggett was born in Austin, the son of Alyce Paulin (Freydenfeldt) and Lloyd Alton Doggett.

His maternal grandparents were Swedish.

Doggett graduated Omicron Delta Kappa and received both a bachelor's degree in business administration and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as student body president his senior year.

While attending the University of Texas at Austin, he also joined Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.

Running for reelection in 1996, Doggett defeated Republican nominee Teresa Doggett, to whom he is no relation.

It marked the second election in a row in which he defeated a black female Republican.

In the years following his first reelection, Doggett consistently won around 85% of the vote, facing only Libertarian opponents.

Redistricting by the Texas Legislature in 2003 split Austin, which had been entirely or almost entirely in the 10th district for more than a century, into three districts.

As part of the 2003 redistricting, heavily Democratic and majority-Latino Laredo had largely been cut out of the 23rd and replaced by several heavily Republican areas near San Antonio.

On June 28, 2006, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the nearby 23rd district's lines violated the rights of Latino voters.

For the 2006 election, Doggett regained most of his old base in Austin (though not the area around the University of Texas at Austin, which stayed in the 21st), and also picked up several suburbs southeast of the city.

After skating to reelection in 2006 and 2008, he was held to only 52 percent of the vote in 2010—his closest race since 1996.

It was reported that the new Congressional maps in Texas turned Doggett's district from a strongly Democratic district into a strongly Republican one.

The new map split Doggett's old territory among five districts.

The 10th, which had once been represented by Lyndon Johnson, had long been a liberal Democratic bastion in increasingly Republican Texas.

Through Republican gerrymandering, Doggett's home wound up in a new, heavily Republican 10th district stretching from north central Austin to the Houston suburbs.