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Breaking: Supreme Court, in Bizarre Unsigned Opinion, Strikes Wisconsin Legislative Maps on Voting Rights Grounds, Signalling New Hostility to the Voting Rights Act
March 23, 2022, 9:49 am
RICK HASEN
In a per curiam (unsigned) opinion on the shadow docket, over the dissent of Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, the Supreme Court has rejected a redistricting plan that a divided Wisconsin Supreme Court had adopted for drawing state assembly and senate districts.
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The Supreme Court’s opinion today says either the Governor or the Supreme Court misapplied the Supreme Court’s VRA and racial gerrymandering precedents, in part by elevating just one of the VRA Gingles factors (proportionality). …
This ruling is bizarre on many levels, all canvassed by the dissenting opinion. The state supreme court did not purport do to a full VRA analysis: it was adopting maps, and those maps could have been challenged later on VRA or equal protection grounds. … The Court did so on skimpy briefing with no oral argument or a chance to fully consider the issues, treating the stay request as a cert petition and deciding the full case on the merits. And, at least on my first quick look, the Court’s substantive resolution of these issues even further narrows the scope of Section 2 of the VRA, making it harder for plaintiffs to win such cases.
So, to sum up: the Court used a case in an emergency procedural posture to reach out and decide an issue that could have waited for full briefing and argument either in a lower court in a challenge to the maps or if the Supreme Court had set the case for argument. It decided these issues in ways hostile to minority voting rights without giving a full opportunity for airing out the issues and pointing out how this will further hurt voters of color. It continues to chip away at the Voting Rights Act without acknowledging that it is killing off the last major protection for minority voters from discriminatory districting plans.
Orange of Specious
Article URL : https://electionlawblog.org/?p=128343