What the new Supreme Court ruling on voting rights means for CA-CalMatters

from Nigel Duara and Maya S. MillerCalMatters

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The latest decision of the Supreme Court narrowing the Voting Rights Act took aim at a provision in civil rights law recently used to help Latinos gain representation in Los Angeles politics.

That’s among the reasons California Democrats criticized the court’s decision in a case that focused on Louisiana’s congressional district boundaries. The court found by a 6-3 majority Thursday that Louisiana had relied too heavily on race to determine boundaries.

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

The rulers give way Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate against people based on their race.

The decision will not change California’s congressional districts, which were redrawn in favor of Democrats after voters approved Proposition 50 last November. Guerrillas are allowed by the constitution, the Supreme Court previously ruled.

The decision also nullified the California Republican Party’s Hail Mary attempts to cancel the new cards of the statewhich the Republican Party claims is a racial hoax in favor of Latinos.

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

Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed the measure after Texas Republicans redrawn congressional boundaries in favor of the GOP. Prop. 50 was intended to help Democrats pick up five additional seats in California.

After the new decision, several southern states in particular could redraw their maps to eliminate “majority-minority” districts that had been drawn to increase the strength of non-white voters. Such a move could remove up to 12 Democrats, according to a New York Times analysisand shift the long-term balance of power in the House to the Republicans. The GOP can then control the lower house of Congress, even if the party loses the vote by a wide margin.

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

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

Christine Nimmers, the Black Power Network’s policy and campaigns manager, said in a statement that the decision rolled back “generations of progress.”

“The ability of voters to challenge discriminatory districts rigged to silence people’s voices based on race is a critical defense against being silenced,” Nimmers said.

In California, violations of the Voting Rights Act are not just a memory of civil rights-era discrimination. Already in 1990A federal judge cited Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in declaring that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unconstitutionally rigged its districts to exclude Hispanic voters.

Section 2 requires redistricting maps to be “equally open to participation” by protected groups — including racial minorities. Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling left Section 2 intact but significantly limited how it could be applied by raising the bar for violations to “a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”

The three-judge Supreme Court’s liberal minority argued that the changes to Section 2 effectively dismantled the Voting Rights Act. The conservative majority on the court narrows the 2013 law.

Conservatives in California celebrated the decision.

Chris Keyser, a senior staff attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the ruling was a long-hoped-for victory for California conservatives who argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act improperly uses race in redistricting.

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

The Voting Rights Act was used primarily to help the state’s growing Hispanic population gain political representation from the 1960s to the 1990s. Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the decision is unlikely to have an immediate impact in California.

The decision will not affect California’s recent redistricting efforts, he said, nor will it affect the decisions of the state’s independent redistricting commission.

“I don’t believe there is arguable fraud in this state,” Saenz said.

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

“By gutting the Voting Rights Act, it 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 is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.