Obama Attorney General Eric (“My People”) Holder announced on Thursday that he going to end-run the Supreme Court’s recent weakening of the anti-South provisions of the Voting Rights Act by litigating in lower federal courts, starting in Texas. [Eric Holder Takes the Fight for Voting Rights to Texas, By Hilary Hylton, Time.com, July 27, 2013]
Not yet clear: what impact this will have on the Edwards Aquifer case, a little-known legal battle in San Antonio in which the Reconquista war on America over the constitution and conservationism converge.
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is demanding that a federal court overthrow the voting structure of the Edwards Aquifer Authority (EAA) in order to guarantee that it be dominated by Hispanics. The San Antonio Water System (SAWS) has “intervened” (read: joined) on behalf of LULAC. [SAWS joins suit against EAA by Colin McDonald, [San Antonio] Express-News, August 27, 2012.]
The EAA provides the vast majority of the water to eight counties in Texas, predominantly Bexar (pronounced “bear”) County, which is dominated by San Antonio. With 1,382,951 residents (63.2 percent of them Hispanic), San Antonio is the seventh largest city in America. (The other counties are Uvalde, Medina, Atascosa, Caldwell, Guadalupe, Comal and Hays.)
There are 17 seats (15 elected) on the EAA. Three are currently in Hispanic hands. LULAC and other Reconquistas want control. To that end, their lawsuit enlists both the U.S. Constitution (14th Amendment) and the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act (VRA), designed to prioritize minority voters, and argues that the EAA’s voting structure violates the “one man, one vote” rule derived from the 14th Amendment, and dilutes minority power.
As usual, the Reconquistas are acting as if “residents” are actually American citizens with the right to vote. Hispanic “residents” may account for 58.9 percent of Bexar County—but, because many are illegal, Hispanic citizens are almost certainly less than a majority. Unless this is a war, invading a jurisdiction does not give foreigners the right to take it over.
Moreover, the EAA voting structure is not supposed to be strictly equalitarian. For years, the aquifer was run by a federal court after repeated litigation.(Going back over a 100 years—see some of the history here.) It was only after many years of negotiation and compromise between the many different interest groups (“stakeholders”), and in light of the federal Endangered Species Act, that the voting structure of the EAA Board was determined. Stakeholders include the city of San Antonio, manufacturing, agriculture, recreation, conservationists and other interest groups.
LULAC, founded in 1929, is the oldest Hispanic “Civil Rights” [i.e. interest] group. Until at least 1954, LULAC was a patriotic organization whose members saw themselves as Americans first. But at some point thereafter, it was transformed into a Treason Lobby faction promoting Reconquista. [Funding Hate - Foundations and the Radical Hispanic Lobby- Part III by Joseph Fallon, The Social Contract, Fall 2000.]
The Main Stream Media have implied that the Reconquistas are opposed by virtually no one, just some old white guy—T. Weir Labatt III, dubbed “Old Man Water” by Robert Rivard of The Rivard Report, which talks of a balance of “stakeholders” and the “Endangered Species Act,” none of which suddenly matters anymore to mainstream media known for paying lip-service to both notions.
Two aspects of this conflict concern us at VDARE.com: The Reconquistas vs. the U.S. Constitution, and the Reconquistas vs. water conservation. These are two sides of the same coin: Mass immigration. Without mass immigration, LULAC would never become a Reconquista organization or be tempted to make this power play. And a national water shortage would not be looming.
Roland Ruiz, the EAA's interim general manager, points out that the agency’s case was established as a “special-purpose water district” to oversee “irrigation, environmental and urban interests in a balanced manner,” rather than to reflect the population in each of its voting districts. Special-purpose districts need not comply with the one-person, one-vote constitutional provision, Ruiz notes.
LULAC disagrees:
Although two U.S. Supreme Court cases declined to apply the one-person, one-vote standard to agricultural water supply districts in California and Arizona, [LULAC attorney David R. Richards] said, “we think this case is readily distinguishable than those.”
[LULAC sues aquifer agency over election methods by Elaine Ayala, [San Antonio] Express-News, June 28, 2012.]
During June, I left Richards a telephone message asking how he could distinguish LULAC v. EAA from the cases that lost in federal court. But he never responded.
As for the Voting Rights Act, like all Civil Rights laws, it has been abused and expanded way beyond its stated purpose. Its original rationale: to protect black Americans’ right to vote. However, it was perverted to enable black minority power by rigging elections for black, and then also for Hispanic, politicians. The Obama regime aids and abets the now-routine violation of white Americans’ voting rights, including through black and Hispanic voter fraud, by using VRA as a pretext to strike down voter ID laws.
Leftist VRA supporters asserted that “pervasive discrimination in voting has persisted in the areas subject to Section 5.” Although VRA was supposed to end after five (!) years in 1970, supporters sought to get it reauthorized in perpetuity as a tool of black and Hispanic racial power. It was re-authorized in 2006 for yet another 25 years. [Shelby Co. v. Holder by Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.]
However, soothing unexpectedly nasty just happened to VRA:
On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court held, 5-4, that the part of the Voting Rights Act, Section 4, which required federal “preclearance,” before a covered jurisdiction (part or all of 15 states, including Texas) could change voting procedures, was unconstitutional, based on changed conditions for which it no longer held relevance, [PDF] and eliminated it henceforth.
[Supreme Court Voting Rights Act Ruling: Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al. by Politico Staff, Politico, June 25, 2013.]
During a long telephone interview, Greg Flores, SAWS’ VP for Public Affairs, [Email him] provided a Lockean rationale for supporting LULAC’s lawsuit that sidestepped the ethnic issue: Money. Flores maintained that since San Antonio pays 80 percent of the money that supports the EAA, it should dominate the board. Flores also cited the disparity whereby farmers’ rate is capped $2 at per acre/foot for water, whereas municipalities are charged $99 per acre/foot, with no cap on the price.
During an extensive telephone interview with me, T. Weir Labatt III (“Old Man Water”) agreed with Greg Flores regarding the disparity: “I agree with Greg that it’s inequitable, but it’s the state legislature that made it inequitable.”
Thus, Labatt suggests, the state legislature, not the courts, must rectify the matter.
Labatt countered further that SAWS’ board had signed off on the EAA’s Habitat Conservation Plan, which included the funding plan, just “four, five months” before joining LULAC’s suit in August, 2012.
SAWS’ President/CEO Robert Puente (2008-) is a former state representative (1991-2008) whose entire political career focused on water conservation. Puente drafted the legislation that created the EAA. Labatt says he had “always found him fair,” but
“Nobody understands why Robert Puente and the SAWS board intervened in the LULAC lawsuit. In 1995, Puente came up with the legislation in terms of user groups [stakeholders]. Why would he change his stripes?
“If (LULAC’s) successful, it could undo what we’ve been doing [working towards balance, consensus, and compromise] for 20 years. Why is LULAC doing this? No one that I know knows the genesis of this lawsuit.”
“With the Edwards Aquifer board, we’ve never had any minority issues.”
Labatt sees LULAC/SAWS losing in the courts. However, should they win, he believes that the federal court will simply remand the matter back to the Texas Legislature to resolve, in which case the EAA might be dissolved and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (the state counterpart of the federal Environmental Protection Agency) be put in charge of the Aquifer, and SAWS would lose whatever influence it presently has. He adds:
“But I think they misgauged the unintended consequences, and they can’t fix it with 14 or 15 [Hispanic EAA Board members]. Therefore, SAWS has miscalculated—all of a sudden SAWS doesn’t have any power over the Aquifer Authority. I think it was a foolish move. I think the long term is going to turn around and bite them real hard.”
One confidential informant in the area suggested that Puente [Email him] might be behind the LULAC suit, in order to enhance his own power.
Water has been called variously, “the new oil” and “the new gold.” Fortunes in the billions of dollars can be made through controlling this limited natural resource.
My theory: At the risk of sounding patronizing, whites like Labatt, who come from a kinder, gentler America, are not used to the new reality, in which racial socialists violate the law with impunity.
I think Robert Puente has gone Reconquista. He is either banking on going to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary, where the Obama Administration has been holding something over Chief Justice John Roberts, “persuading” him to reverse his position in crucial votes like Obamacare and join the lynch mob attacking federal Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones, or lower-level federal judges getting phone calls from Washington. Should the court stratagem fail, Eric Holder’s Justice Department will intervene against Texas, and on behalf of Puente.
With Obama and Holder behind him, Puente will simply ignore all of the petty legalities—the Endangered Species Act, the EAA law, and Texas agencies. Presently unpaid EAA board positions would be paid salaries, and Reconquista cronies could make billions off the water.
The next round in the Edwards Aquifer water war will play out in the courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Orlando Garcia (PDF), Western District of Texas, San Antonio Division, where a status conference will be held on August 7.
Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
