Unfortunate but not unexpected.
Two months before a scheduled trial, a coalition of voting rights groups is withdrawing from a long-running challenge to the political maps Texas drew after the 2020 U.S. census, which the groups said diluted the voting power of Black, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander Texans.
The outcome of the case, which has been making its way through the courts for nearly four years, will have implications for how much power Texans will have to decide who represents them in the state Legislature and U.S. Congress.
The voting-rights coalition said it decided against continuing the litigation after its claims were dismissed by a trial-court panel of federal judges in February, following a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that experts said upended longstanding precedents.
The withdrawal is the latest tangible effect of recent court rulings that experts say make it difficult for coalitions to bring claims on behalf of groups of historically marginalized voters.
The coalition that withdrew included Fair Maps Texas Action Committee, OCA-Greater Houston, the North Texas chapter of the Asian Pacific Islander Americans Public Affairs Association, Emgage Texas, and 13 individual voters. They are represented by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, the ACLU of Texas, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justice.
Their case had been consolidated with that of other plaintiffs who were also challenging the maps. The remaining claims are still set to go to trial beginning May 21.
The remaining plaintiffs in the case are organizations representing Latino and Black Texans, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Texas NAACP, and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, as well as individual Texans.
The 5th Circuit had decided long ago that different groups of minority voters could be combined to support a claim in such a redistricting case, as long as they were groups that tended to vote the same way. Essentially, if there aren’t enough Black voters or Latino voters, or voters of another protected class, to make up a majority of the district by themselves, they can join forces as plaintiffs if they can show that their political interests align. That’s how the coalition of groups came together to challenge the Texas voting maps.
But in 2024, the same court overturned that precedent, prompting the trial court judges to dismiss the coalition’s claims. As a result, “It’ll be much harder for plaintiffs to bring those claims in the Fifth Circuit in Texas and in Mississippi and Louisiana, than it is elsewhere in the country,” said Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
These lawsuits were filed in 2021. There were some state cases as well as federal, and I think some may have been moved to federal court while at least one was dropped, and I have no idea about the rest. The Justice Department filed their own lawsuit a couple of weeks later, but it was dropped by the Trumpists in March. Those lawsuits were broader and about multiple districts, but there were other, narrower actions as well. As was the case with the challenges to the omnibus voter suppression law, the hearings were delayed until after the 2022 election; it’s obviously taken much longer than that. SCOTUS has weighed in on racial gerrymandering, and other federal courts have raised the stakes, and all of that may be out of date by now.
Basically, I have no idea what to expect from the May 21 hearing. The script in the recent past has been a win at the district court level for the plaintiffs, and then the Fifth Circuit and SCOTUS get involved, with predictably awful results. It would not surprise me if we follow that basic path, with SCOTUS being given another chance to do violence to the Voting Rights Act in a couple of years. Buckle up.