Supreme Court Delivers More Bad Redistricting News for Democrats

The two big redistricting news stories, of late, represent a one-two punch that set back Democrats’ midterm election prospects. First, Virginia’s attempt to gerrymander the Commonwealth’s Republican congressional caucus down to a single House seat was halted by the state’s Supreme Court. Then, the US Supreme Court sided with a challenge to Louisiana’s serpentine 6th Congressional District. On May 18, SCOTUS delivered more redistricting conundrums by rebuffing efforts by two lower courts to impose racial gerrymandering.

The Virginia decision had nothing to do with majority-minority districts – those that have been created to ensure one racial demographic or another dominates. Rather, it was about Commonwealth legislators violating their own constitution. The Louisiana case did relate to race, however, as did the vacating of two lower court decisions in Mississippi and North Dakota.

A Pair of Redistricting Setbacks for Democrats

In Board of Election Commissioners v. NAACP, the Southern District of Mississippi sided with plaintiffs who claimed that certain legislative districts diluted the black vote. The state was ordered by a three-judge panel to redraw districts to address that alleged transgression.

In North Dakota – with Turtle Mountain Band v. Howe – the issue was again one of race. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals was looking at a challenge to North Dakota legislative districts that supposedly water down the power of the Native American vote, according to plaintiffs. The appeals court’s decision, in this case, was a matter of standing. The court ruled that only the federal government can sue to enforce the provisions of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) – an idea already rejected by the nation’s highest court because it goes against longstanding legal practices.

Both the North Dakota and Mississippi cases have been sent back to the respective lower courts for further consideration in light of the recent Callais decision, the Louisiana redistricting case. That ruling, despite being widely reported as a weakening of the VRA, was, in fact, entirely in line with the law written to enforce the protections contained in the 15th Amendment, forbidding racial motives to be the primary consideration in electoral matters.

However, the Callais decision did not address the issue of who is permitted to sue to enforce Section 2 of the VRA.

The lone Supreme Court dissenter was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She argued that the bench should have summarily resolved the cases – rather than punting back to the lower courts – to clarify the matter of who can bring such challenges.

The two cases dealt with on May 18, then, threw up contradictory positions. Both suits were brought by private parties. One court (in Mississippi) accepted the legitimacy of the suit, while the other did not, after the state (North Dakota) appealed an earlier decision.

In light of the Callais ruling, neither of these cases may go the way Democrats would have preferred. Texas may have ignited an unusual midterm redistricting battle, but blue states eagerly jumped in, believing they could eliminate safe Republican districts to gain a better shot at control of Congress in November. However, as Liberty Nation’s editor-at-large, James Fite, put it – without predicting whether this interstate electoral warfare translates into votes at the polling booth – “a sweeping Republican victory seems a foregone conclusion in this historic mid-decade redistricting war.”