NEW ORLEANS — A divided federal appeals court ruled Thursday that individual minority groups cannot form coalitions to argue that their votes are being diluted in district redistricting cases under the Voting Rights Act, recognizing that it was overturning years of its own precedent.
It was a reorganization case in Galveston CountyTexas, where black and Latino groups had joined to challenge county commission district maps. A federal district judge had rejected the maps, saying they would dilute minority strength. A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals initially upheld the decision before the full court decided to reconsider the issue, resulting in Thursday’s 12-6 decision.
Writing for the majority, Judge Edith Jones said such challenges by minority coalitions “are inconsistent” with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and are not supported by Supreme Court case law. The decision reverses a 1988 5th Circuit decision and will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court.
“Nowhere does Section 2 provide that two minority groups may join forces to pursue a claim for vote dilution,” wrote Jones, who was nominated to the court by former President Ronald Reagan. “To the contrary, the statute identifies the subject of a claim for vote dilution as ‘a class,’ in the singular, not the plural.”
Jones was joined on the court by 11 other nominees of Republican presidents. Five members nominated by Democratic presidents and one nominee of a Republican president dissented. The 5th Circuit hears cases from federal district courts in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
“Today, the majority has finally dismantled the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act in this circuit, eclipsing four decades of en banc precedent,” said dissenting Justice Dana Douglas, nominated to the court by President Joe Biden. Her dissent noted that Galveston County plays a prominent role in the nation’s celebration of Juneteenth, the date in 1865 when Union soldiers told enslaved Black people in Galveston that they had been freed.
“To reach this conclusion, the majority must reject established methods of interpreting the law and jump through hoops to find exceptions,” Douglas wrote.
