The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dismissed an appeal of a lower court’s decision to redraw Virginia’s 2011 legislative map, locking in new court-ordered state House districts for the November election.
In a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled the GOP-led House of Delegates wasn’t in a position to appeal a lower court’s decision that the old map was unfairly drawn to cram black voters together in 11 state House districts.
Lawmakers in 2011 drew the map so that majority-minority districts would contain at least 55 percent black voters, arguing that would allow them to select legislators of their choice.
The justices sided with Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring, who argued Republican delegates, led by Speaker of the House Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, don’t represent the state’s interests and therefore can’t appeal the U.S. District Court’s ruling.
“In short, Virginia would rather stop than fight on,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her opinion, joining Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch in the ruling. “One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process.”
This is the second time the Supreme Court has been asked to rule on the 2011 map. The first time a lower court’s ruling was appealed in 2017, justices found one of 12 legislative districts unconstitutional. For the other 11, they ruled the lower court judges had applied the wrong legal standard.
The map was bumped back to the trial court, where a three-judge panel ruled in June 2018 that the 11 districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered. Cox appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Throughout this litigation, the House has purported to represent only its own interests,” Ginsburg wrote, but in Virginia, only the attorney general had standing to appeal the case.
Herring chose not to challenge the lower court’s ruling, citing the cost to taxpayers, the chance of winning and “the right of Virginians to vote in districts that are not tainted by racial gerrymandering.”
In a statement Monday, he called the ruling a “big win” for Virginia.
“It’s unfortunate that the House Republicans wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and months of litigation in a futile effort to protect racially gerrymandered districts, but the good news is that this fall’s elections will take place in constitutionally drawn districts,” he said.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling comes five months before all 140 seats in the legislature are up for re-election and serves as the official word that the new legislative map — ordered by a lower court in February — is set in stone for the next two years.
It puts thousands of Virginia voters in new districts, including six in Hampton Roads, and makes the districts more competitive, which could help determine whether Republicans keep their narrow majority or Democrats take control of the House.
Cox said in a statement Monday the Supreme Court decision represented the end of a “disappointing saga of orchestrated attacks against the constitutionally-enacted redistricting plan.”
He said the House GOP would be prepared to defend and grow its majority this November.
“We are confident that voters will opt for the leadership and results we have delivered over chaos, embarrassment, and unchecked Democratic control of state government.”
Representing the four dissenters, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the new court-ordered map would harm the House of Delegates in a “very fundamental way.”
“When the boundaries of a district are changed, the constituents and communities of interest
present within the district are altered, and this is likely to change the way in which the district’s representative does his or her work,” he wrote.
It’s uncertain who will draw the Congressional and state legislative maps in 2021 after the decennial U.S. Census count is done.
The legislature passed a bill this session to create an eight-citizen, eight-lawmaker redistricting commission that would draw new lines every decade when new population data is collected. That bill still has to pass in the 2020 General Assembly and be approved by voters in November 2020 before the commission is created.
Also on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled a company couldn’t mine raw uranium ore from a site near Coles Hill, Va. The high court ruled 6-3 to uphold the mining ban.
This is a developing story. Check dailypress.com for updates.
//assets.documentcloud.org/viewer/loader.js
DV.load(“https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6155045-U-S-Supreme-Court-ruling-on-Virginia.js”, {
responsive: true,
height: 800,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-6155045-U-S-Supreme-Court-ruling-on-Virginia”
});
U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Virginia gerrymandering case (PDF)
U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Virginia gerrymandering case (Text)
