SCOTUS rejects Federal Court redistricting maps in Texas

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Supreme Court on Friday unanimously overturned orders issued by a federal court in Texas that drew its own new maps for legislative districts, and ordered it to reconsider. Lyle Denniston writes at SCOTUSblog UPDATE: Court rejects Texas maps, delays W.Va. map:

In an 11-page unsigned opinion, the Court said that the three-judge District Court in San Antonio may not have used the “appropriate standards,” which the Court spelled out in some detail. 

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a separate opinion, repeated his view that a key federal voting rights act implicated in the Texas case is unconstitutional.  The decision is here.

Because of Justice Thomas’s view about Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he would have ordered the San Antonio court to let Texas use its own maps without change for the 2012 elections.  However, the other Justices did not accept that approach, instead ordering the court in Texas to start with the state’s plan but also to make some rulings about whether any parts of it are likely to be nullified in court.

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When the case is taken up again by the San Antonio court, it is now under orders to use a series of maps drawn by the state legislature last year “as a starting point” for crafting any new districts.  Although Texas’s own maps have not yet been legally cleared in Washington, as Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires, the Court said that does not mean that the legislature’s maps, or the policies that lay behind the creation of those maps, “can be disregarded by a district court drawing an interim plan.”

The San Antonio court is judging challenges to the Texas maps only under a different part of the Voting Rights Act — Section 2 — and under the Constitution.  A federal District Court in Washington this week began a trial of the Section 5 issue.  The Supreme Court told the San Antonio court not to prejudge what the Washington court may do under Section 5, but the Texas court is under a duty to decide whether it is “reasonably probable” that parts of the plan will not get cleared under Section 5.

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Turning to its own past precedents, the Court — citing its 1996 decision in Lopez v. Monterey County — said that a District Court may not adopt “as its own” a state plan that needs Washington clearance but does not yet have it.  However, the precedents “say nothing about whether a district court may take guidance from the lawful policies incorporated in such a plan for aid in drawing an interim map.”  Turning then to its 1982 decision in Upham v. Seamon, the Court said that a district court has a duty to “defer to the unobjectionable aspects of a state’s plan” even in a situation where clearance was sought but had been denied.

The Justices flatly rejected the declaration of the San Antonio court that it was “not required to give any deference” to what the legislature had crafted.

Further, the Court wrote, “because the District Court here had the benefit of a recently enacted plan to assist it, the court had neither the need nor the license to cast aside that vital aid.”

Justice Thomas, writing for himself, made clear that he holds to the view that the entire structure of Section 5, requiring some states and local governments to get Washington legal approval before they may put into effect any change in their election laws, is unconstitutional.  That constitutional question is under new review in the D.C. Circuit Court, and is likely to be raised further by state or local governments governed by Section 5.

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In ordering the San Antonio court to give more heed to the redistricting maps fashioned by the Texas legislature, the Court’s opinion said that the “serious constitutional questions” raised by Section 5′s “intrusion on state sovereignty” would “only be exacerbated” if that law “required a district court to wholly ignore the state’s policies in drawing maps that will govern a state’s elections, without any reason to believe those state policies are unlawful.”

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It will now be up to the court in Texas to establish new mechanisms, with the aid of lawyers in the case, to get redistricting maps in place in time.   The February 1 deadline to which the Texas court has previously referred is necessary to assure that new maps are in place so that the Texas primary elections can go forward, as currently scheduled, on April 3.

In its second ruling Friday on courts’ power to draw new election districts, the Supreme Court in a West Virginia case raised doubts about the authority of federal District Courts to require states to achieve absolute equality of population in drafting new voting boundaries. Lyle Denniston writes at SCOTUSblog New view on one-person, one-vote?:

In a brief order, found here, the Court blocked a federal court order that insisted that “zero variance” in population was now the constitutional norm in new redistricting cases in order to satisfy the one-person, one-vote mandate.

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The 2-1 ruling January 4 by a three-judge District Court in Charleston will remain on hold, the Justices’ order said, until the Court has received and decided an appeal of that ruling.  The practical effect seems to be that West Virginia can go ahead with elections this year under a plan crafted by its state legislature for election districts used in choosing the state’s three members of the U.S. House of Representatives.  There very likely is insufficient time for the appeal to be processed and decided during the current Court Term, running through late June.

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Because the Supreme Court’s order delaying the lower court decision contained no explanation, there is no way to know just why the Justices acted.  But the core issue raised by state officials in their stay application (Tennant, et al., v. Jefferson County Commission, et al., 11A674) was whether state legislatures in drawing new congressional maps must do everything they can to achieve absolute equality in the population assigned to each district.   A stay order, however, is not a guarantee that the Supreme Court will ultimately overrule the lower court and reject the equal population principle as that court applied it.  One factor that the Court does consider in granting a stay, though, is whether there is a reasonable likelihood that the lower court will be overturned at the end of the review process.

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In fact, in the Texas opinion that emerged Friday, the Court made a passing mention of its doubts about the need for federal courts to push for absolute equality in new districts’ populations.  One of the reasons the lower court in the Texas case had erred, the opinion said, was in altering a state legislature’s map “to achieve de minimis population variations” without a legal reason to do so.   A “de minimis” variation, of course, is not zero variation, but something above that.

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Under the Court’s Rules, the state officials who obtained the stay on Friday have 60 days after they file a formal notice of appeal in the District Court to file an appeal with the Supreme Court.  In the West Virginia case, if the full time allowed is actually taken, the appeal would not reach the Justices until early March.  Unless the case were put on an exaggeratedly expedited schedule, it could not be heard and decided in the current Term.

So on the eve of the second anniversary of what many legal scholars would place among the worst wrongly decided decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, Citizens United v. FEC, the "Felonious Five" of the radical conservative activist court are foreshadowing that they are not yet done dismantling the election laws of this country. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, frequently upheld by this Court, is now directly threatened for being overturned by Justice Clarence Thomas. And even the "one person, one vote" standard of Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964) may now be in doubt as well.