The case is a relic—but could influence Virginia politics for the decade to come
on March 18th, justices sparred with four lawyers over whether the electoral map for Virginia’s House of Delegates violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s bar on racial discrimination. The hearing inwas bracing but, given its context and timing, rather belated. The map under scrutiny was drafted in 2011, following the 2010 census. Challengers filed suit in 2014 against 12 majority-black districts which, they say, were drawn with too much of an emphasis on race.
Paul Clement, a veteran Supreme Court litigator who argued for the House of Delegates, called this position “deeply flawed” with “enormous consequences” for all-too-common situations when a state government’s legislative and executive branches are at loggerheads. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg responded that the House of Delegates “isn't even the legislative branch; it's one house of the legislature”. Justice Sotomayor agreed. The 2011 map “doesn't belong to the House”, she said.
The hearing did not get much clearer when it turned to the heart of the issue: whether the 2011 map violated the constitution. Virginia says it aimed at a black voting population in each of the 11 districts of at least 55% to satisfy the terms of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law that protects minorities’ right to elect “candidates of choice”. But the maps’ challengers said the 55% target was, in effect, too much of a good thing that diluted black voters’ influence in neighbouring districts.
For Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Mr Elias’s position denies states the “flexibility” they need to abide by the terms of the Voting Rights Act while also avoiding a constitutional violation. If Virginia had aimed to create districts that were just “52% or 53%” African-American, Justice Kavanaugh said, it “would be hammered from the other side”. Mr Elias’s response was sensible if subtle: the key isn’t the percentage itself but the method by which the state arrives at it.
ruling, the Supreme Court struck down the section of the Voting Rights Act that Virginia says compelled it to use the target of 55% black voters. So when the next round of redistricting comes early in the coming decade, states with chequered histories of racial discrimination will no longer be required to get their maps approved by the Department of Justice. It is unclear what that new lenience will mean for minority voters.
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