Appeals court narrows Voting Rights Act’s scope for redistricting cases in the South

(CNN) — The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act for redistricting cases in a large swath of the South, ruling against the Justice Department and voters of color who had challenged Galveston, Texas’s county commission map for how it been redrawn to dismantle a district where minorities made up a majority of the population.

The conservative appeals court on Thursday reversed its previous precedent that allowed multiple minority groups to join together in challenges to redistricting plans alleged to be discriminatory under the VRA.

Circuit Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote in the majority opinion that so-called coalition districts are “inconsistent with the text” of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court has not directly addressed the question of coalition districts and the Voting Rights Act. Other circuit courts have disagreed over whether the landmark civil rights law contemplated such legal challenges by multi-racial coalitions.

Jones wrote that the VRA “has accomplished its original purposes with great success” and asserted that Thursday’s ruling “has accomplished its original purposes with great success.”

In the Galveston case, the county was accused of violating the Voting Rights Act by breaking up a commission district that had grouped together Black and Hispanic communities, which together make up 39% of the county’s population and largely support Democrats. Under the disputed plan, White people – who overwhelming support Republicans in Galveston – now are the majority in all four commission districts.

The trial judge, a Trump appointee, had struck down the redrawn map in a scathing opinion that said that the county’s “obliteration” of the majority-minority district was “stark,” “jarring,” “egregious” and “mean-spirited.”

The case will return to the trial court for more proceedings examining whether the map was redrawn with the intent to discriminate against Black and Hispanic voters.

Christian Adams, a lawyer for the county, called the new ruling a “great win for the rule of law and the Constitution.”

A lawyer for the voters who challenged the map said that they were “disappointed with this decision, which not only ignores decades of legal precedent but also the language of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

“We’re considering next steps at this time,” the lawyer, Valencia Richardson of Campaign Legal Center, said. The Justice Department did not immediately provide comment.

Coalition district claims are not commonly brought, voting rights experts have told CNN, because such challenges must meet particular, fact-specific circumstances to be successful. However, they said that the now-reversed precedent had a prophylactic effect by discouraging map drawers from breaking up coalition districts. The 5th Circuit’s new ruling will apply to Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi – all states where map-drawers were required to get federal approval for redistricting plans until a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted what was known as the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act.

A dissent to the 5th Circuit’s Thursday ruling written by Biden-appointed Circuit Judge Dana Douglas and joined by all the Democratic-appointees on the court said that “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.”

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