Supreme Court ruling on voting won’t change California districts, but could hurt Democrats

Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling narrowing the Voting Rights Act undermines legal protections that have helped Latinos gain representation in politics, California Democrats and activists say.

The case centered on the boundaries of a Louisiana congressional district. The court found by a 6-3 majority that Louisiana had relied too heavily on race to decide the borders.

“One may lament partisan gerrymandering, but … partisan gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority. “And in a racial gerrymandering case like the one before us, race and politics must be disentangled.”

The ruling scales back Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate against people based on their race.

The ruling will not change California’s congressional districts, which were redrawn to favor Democrats after voters approved Proposition 50 last November. Partisan gerrymanders are permitted under the constitution, the Supreme Court has previously ruled.

The decision also nullifies the California Republican Party’s “Hail Mary” attempts to invalidate the state’s new maps, which the GOP argued were a racial gerrymander to favor Latinos.

But when it comes to House majority math in the U.S. Congress and which party clinches a majority in the November election, the curtailing of Section 2 could make Democrats’ Prop. 50 gains moot.

Gov. Gavin Newsom put forward the measure after Texas Republicans redrew congressional boundaries to favor the GOP. Prop. 50 was meant to help Democrats pick up five additional California seats.

After the new ruling, several southern states in particular could redraw their maps to eliminate “majority-minority” districts that were drawn to magnify the power of nonwhite voters. Such a move could oust as many as 12 Democrats, according to a New York Times analysis, and shift the long-term balance of power in the House toward Republicans. The GOP could then control Congress’s lower chamber even if the party loses the popular vote by a wide margin.

Newsom called the new ruling “outrageous.” Attorney General Rob Bonta, also a Democrat, said in a statement that while it’s unclear what impacts the changes will have on California, the ruling overall endangers minority voters in other states.

“While the full impact of this ruling is still uncertain, we know from past experience that decisions striking down, or effectively gutting, provisions of the Voting Rights Act are often followed by new state laws that restrict access to the ballot for voters of color,” Bonta said in a statement.

Kristin Nimmers, policy and campaigns manager of the Black Power Network, said in a statement that the decision rolls back “generations of progress.”

“The ability of voters to challenge discriminatory districts manipulated to drown out people’s voices based on race is a critical safeguard against being silenced,” Nimmers said.

In California, Voting Rights Act violations aren’t only a memento of Civil Rights-era discrimination. As recently as 1990, a federal judge cited Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in declaring the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had unconstitutionally gerrymandered their districts to exclude Latino voters.

Section 2 required that redrawn district maps must be “equally open to participation” from protected groups — including racial minorities. The Supreme Court decision on Wednesday left Section 2 intact, but significantly curtailed how it could be applied by raising the bar for violations to “a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”

The high court’s three-justice liberal minority argued that the changes to Section 2 effectively dismantled the Voting Rights Act. The conservative majority on the court has been narrowing the law since 2013.

Conservatives in California celebrated the ruling.

Chris Kieser, senior attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the ruling was a victory long hoped for by California conservatives who had argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act improperly used race in redistricting.

“The very idea of a majority-minority district and having a candidate of their choice is kind of antithetical to democracy,” Kieser said. “Voting is an individual right, it’s not a group right.”

The Voting Rights Act has been primarily used to help the state’s growing Latino population achieve political representation from the 1960s to the 1990s. Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the ruling is unlikely to have much immediate impact in California.

The ruling won’t affect California’s recent redistricting effort, he said, nor will it affect the independent state redistricting commission’s decisions.

“I don’t believe there is any challengeable gerrymandering in this state,” Saenz said.

But Rosalind Gold, chief public policy officer of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, said the ruling has dire long-term implications for Latino representation in California.

“By eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, this could open the door to counties and localities looking at how they used Section 2 to draw their maps and challenging those maps,” Gold said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.