Appeals Court Further Narrows Voting Rights Act’s Scope
The New York Times
Reversing decades of precedent, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in a Texas case that different minority groups cannot jointly claim that their votes have been diluted.
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.
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