The Democratic Party’s already fading hopes of regaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives this year dimmed further Friday. The Supreme Court denied the Democrats any emergency help in Virginia, one of that party’s best places to pick up House seats.
The Court acted without a word of explanation and without any Justice willing to be listed in support of Democrats’ defense of their new redistricting maps. Less favorable districts must now be used this year.
With Republican-controlled legislatures in a lengthening list of states moving rapidly to redraw election maps to raise barriers to Democratic candidates for the House, the Justices’ action last night bars Virginia Democrats from doing the same to their Republican rivals.
Much of this frenzied activity across the nation is in response to the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision significantly narrowing the protection of federal civil rights law for minority voters – the most reliable supporters in the Democratic coalition.
By authorizing state legislatures to engage in redistricting along strict party lines, the Supreme Court’s decision has raised the real prospect that as many as 14 House seats now held by Democrats will be made safe for Republican candidates, while Democrats seem to have fewer opportunities. (Most of the Democrats who could lose their seats are black or Hispanic.) The House of Representatives that now sits is very closely divided along party lines, but Democrats had been optimistic about gaining a majority in November because of the deep political woes of President Trump.
In Virginia, new maps drawn by the Democratic-controlled legislature were designed to shift four GOP seats to the Democrats, but the use of those districts is now forbidden. (The maps had actually been blocked on May 8 by a split decision of the Virginia Supreme Court, and a Democratic emergency plea to revive that plan failed in the apparent unanimous vote of the Justices on Friday.)
The Justices’ order appeared to have been issued hastily, and both sides had wanted that, because election preparations are already underway in Virginia. The order was made public shortly after all of the legal filings had been completed in the case. It was only a temporary order, and the state Democrats will have an opportunity to file a full appeal, but that seems now to have less chance of succeeding after Friday’s action.
Because the Supreme Court provided no explanation for denying the Democrats’ plea, there is no way for anyone outside the Court to know why it happened. The Virginia Republicans had filed multiple procedural objections, and any of those might have worked with the Justices. (The one-sentence, 18-word order was unsigned and revealed none of the Justices’ votes – a hint, if not a certainty, of unanimity.)
Among possible explanations: a reluctance to interfere with the election calendar now unfolding, a hesitancy to disturb a state court decision that had been based largely on an interpretation of the state constitution, uncertainty about whether there were genuine issues of federal law at stake, and concern about some hazy legal points and when they had been raised.
While the actual outcome has strong political implications for Virginia (as there have been across the country as a consequence of other rulings by the Justices on voting rights issues), there is no way that critics of the Court could prove that the Supreme Court is determined to help Republicans. The majority of the Court has for years been highly skeptical of the breadth of federal voting rights laws, and the April 29 decision (in a Louisiana case) continued – and broadened — that trend.
That decision made it much more difficult for minority voters and their supporters to rely for protection on Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – the only part of that historic Act that remained intact in the wake of what the Supreme Court has done since 2013.
