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APPEALS COURT FURTHER NARROWS VOTING RIGHTS ACT’S SCOPE  
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Michael Wines and J. David Goodman
August 2, 2024
New York Times
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_ The ruling this week that narrows the scope of the Voting Rights
Act applies directly only in the three states covered by the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, but it has national
implications. _

, Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

 

A federal appeals court further narrowed the scope of the 1965 Voting
Rights Act, ruling that members of separate minority groups cannot
join together to claim that a political map has been drawn to dilute
their voting power.

The 12-to-6 ruling on Thursday by the full Fifth Circuit Court of
Appeals overturned almost four decades of legal precedent, as well as
earlier rulings by a three-judge panel of the same appeals court and,
before that, a federal district court. It applies only in Louisiana,
Mississippi and Texas, the three states where the court has
jurisdiction. But the decision, which deals with a fairly common issue
in redistricting, has national implications.

The case involves a district map for county commissioners in Galveston
County, Texas. Mark Henry, the elected county judge who oversees the
Republican-dominated commissioner’s court that drew the map, called
the ruling “a great win for the rule of law and the Constitution.”
Mr. Henry is a defendant in the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs in the case, including the Justice Department and
branches of the N.A.A.C.P. and the League of United Latin American
Citizens, or LULAC, have not decided whether to appeal the ruling to
the U.S. Supreme Court. But lawyers for the plaintiffs noted that the
decision handed down on Thursday ordered the federal district court to
reconsider two other claims from the original lawsuit — that the
county had intentionally discriminated against minority voters, and
that it had engaged in illegal racial gerrymandering. So the map could
still be found illegal on those grounds.

“We still have a lifeline,” said Robert Quintero, the president of
the Galveston chapter of LULAC. “We won at this court before, and we
hope that the judge will use his same wisdom that he used in the first
decision.”

A lawyer for the Black and Latino voters who brought the suit, Mark P.
Gaber of the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, said the argument
that their voting power had been diluted remained strong.

“I’m hopeful that at the end of the day, we’re going to prevail
for the minority citizens of Galveston County,” he said.

The latest round of redistricting in Galveston County, a community of
350,000 people, redrew a district in which Black and Hispanic voters
together had made up a majority of voters. The redrawn boundaries
reduced their combined share of the district’s electorate to 38
percent. The lawsuit challenging the new map claimed that doing so
violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits drawing
boundaries that dilute minority voting power.

The trial judge, and the three-judge appellate panel each ruled that
the new map was a clear violation of the law. But the full Fifth
Circuit disagreed.

“Nowhere does Section 2 indicate that two minority groups may
combine forces to pursue a vote dilution claim,” Judge Edith H.
Jones, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote for the
majority. “On the contrary, the statute identifies the subject of a
vote dilution claim as ‘a class,’ in the singular, not the
plural.”

That reasoning ran counter to the same court’s logic in a 1988 case,
Campos v. Baytown, that had set the precedent for cases of this sort.
In that case, the majority wrote that “there is nothing in the law
that prevents the plaintiffs from identifying the protected aggrieved
minority to include both Blacks and Hispanics.”

Judge Dana Marie Douglas, who was named to the court by President
Biden, joined four other judges in a caustic dissent. “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.

Judge Douglas noted that Congress referred to several cases that
involved coalitions of minority-group voters when it amended the
Voting Rights Act in 1975, and specifically mentioned coalitions of
voters when it amended another part of the act, Section 5, in 2006.

The 12 judges in the majority were all appointed by Republican
presidents. Five of the six dissenters were named by Democratic
presidents.

Lawsuits like the one in Galveston that are brought by a coalition of
voters from different minority groups are not uncommon, but they are
particularly difficult to win because it must be proved that the
voters in the coalition are “cohesive” and have common interests.

The Galveston case was seen as an especially strong one. The federal
judge who made the initial ruling in the case, District Judge Jeffrey
Vincent Brown, called the evidence of dilution “stark and
jarring,” and said in his decision that the map was “fundamentally
inconsistent” with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Judge Brown
was named to the bench by President Donald J. Trump.

Joe Compian, the mayor pro tem of the city of La Marque and one of the
named plaintiffs in the case, said that the redrawn map upheld by the
Fifth Circuit markedly affected his city, where most residents are
Black or Hispanic.

Before the district map was redrawn in 2021, he said, La Marque had
been represented on the commissioner’s court by its lone Democrat.
The new map not only undermined electoral representation for Black and
Hispanic residents, he said, but it also fractured La Marque’s voice
on the commissioner’s court.

“Now we have to reach out to three different commissioners, because
they basically took our community and divided it,” Mr. Compian said.

_Michael Wines [[link removed]] is a
national correspondent, writing about voting and election issues. He
is based in Washington, D.C. More about Michael Wines
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_J. David Goodman [[link removed]] is the
Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and
Oklahoma. More about J. David Goodman
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* voting rights
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* Voting Rights Act
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* right wing
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* Federal Courts;
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