The Supreme Court on Monday handed Virginia Democrats a victory in allowing new voting lines for state House districts to remain intact.
The high court ruled 5-4 that the GOP-controlled Virginia House of Delegates did not have the standing to challenge a lower court ruling that invalidated nearly a dozen state House districts as racial gerrymanders.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority, and she was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Samuel Alito dissented and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh.
“The House has identified no legal basis for its claimed authority to litigate on the state’s behalf,” Ginsburg said. “To the contrary, a Virginia statute provides, with exceptions not implicated here, that the state’s attorney general, together with his assistants, is solely responsible for providing legal representation to the state in civil litigation.”
In finding the House of Delegates cannot bring the case, the Supreme Court left in place new district lines approved by a federal court in February and used in the state’s primary elections last week.
The new voting map is viewed as favorable to Democrats and could affect control of the state legislature. Republicans control the state House of Delegates by a slim 51-49 margin and the state Senate 21-19, but Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam has more than two-and-a-half years left in office, and his party could potentially win full control of state government for the first time in more than a quarter-century.
The case involves 11 state House districts that were drawn after the 2010 census. A group of voters challenged the voting lines on the grounds that the state legislature used race as the predominant factor when it drew the districts in violation of the Constitution.
A panel of lower-court judges agreed in a ruling last year that the contested districts were racially gerrymandered and called for new maps to be drawn.
The Virginia attorney general declined to appeal the ruling invalidating the 11 state House districts and said doing so “would be in the best interest of the Commonwealth or its citizens.” But the Virginia House of Delegates sought review by the Supreme Court instead and asked the justices to put map-making proceedings on hold while the litigation continued.
The Supreme Court, however, declined to intervene in the case then, giving the green light for a court-appointed mapmaker to continue with efforts to draw new voting boundaries.
A three-judge panel in Virginia approved the new map in February by a 2-1 vote, and primaries were held with the new maps last week.
“In short, Virginia would rather stop than fight on,” Ginsburg said. ”One House of its bicameral legislature cannot along continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process.”
But Alito argued the Virginia House of Delegates does have standing to appeal the lower court’s ruling and said the body would be harmed by the redistricting plan enacted by the court.
“Districting matters because it has institutional and legislative consequences,” he wrote. “To suggest otherwise, to argue that substituting one plan for another has no effect on the work or output of the legislative body whose districts are changed, would really be quite astounding.”
