Voters in two different minority groups cannot combine efforts to claim a Texas political map stripped their voting power, according to a federal appeals court decision that could win congressional seats for Republicans in the South.
Conservatives had claimed that Democrats were misusing the Voting Rights Act to create voting districts favoring their party in Galveston, Texas, and the appeals court agreed.
The same thing was happening in other parts of Texas as well as Mississippi and Louisiana. Fixing the problem could turn a number of blue districts red again and potentially shift the balance of power in the House.
Section 2 of the law prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race or color, but the appeals court decided it does not support coalition claims of multiple groups acting together.
In many of the affected districts, no single group comprises a majority, but several groups together do.
Until 2021, Galveston was a combined Black and Hispanic majority district. When redistricting eliminated that makeup, the the NAACP and the Justice Department sued Texas, but they have now lost.
They got their way with the lower court, but the appeals court reversed the decision.
Section 2’s language specifies protections for a “class” of citizens, not “classes,” the court discovered, which means that political alliances between different minority groups are not covered by the law.
Appeals court Judge Edith Jones wrote that the 5th Circuit refused to rubber stamp litigation “not compelled by law or the Supreme Court, whose principal effects are to (a) supplant legislative redistricting by elected representatives with judicial fiat; (b) encourage divisively counting citizens by race and ethnicity; and (c) displace the fundamental principle of democratic rule by the majority with balkanized interests.”
The ruling is a major one because it will prevent what turns out to be rule by the minority in many cases.
The deck has seemed unfairly stacked against Republicans for the past few decades, and now we know why.
The silver lining has been that it forced Republicans to make some inroads with Black and Hispanic voters, which means they could be stronger than ever in those areas.
The House is a toss-up in November with a very small Republican majority under threat by numerous retirements.
This ruling could be a big boost for them to try to hold on.
