The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a challenge to Virginia’s state legislative maps, keeping in place a new map that boosts Democratic chances of retaking the Virginia House of Representatives in 2019.

In a short 5-4 decision, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that Virginia’s Republican-controlled House did not have the authority to appeal a lower-court ruling that 11 state legislative districts were racially gerrymandered by Republicans and needed to be redrawn. Neither the state senate nor the Virginia attorney general joined the appeal, making it invalid, the justices found. “One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process,” Ginsburg wrote. In a strange bedfellow lineup, Ginsburg was joined in the majority by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, and Brett Kavanaugh.

In 2018, a three-judge federal district court in Virginia ruled that Republicans illegally concentrated black voters into a small number of predominately African American districts in order to make the surrounding districts whiter and more favorable to Republicans. “Race predominated over traditional districting factors,” the majority ruled.

The court ordered a nonpartisan redistricting expert to draw new districts for 2019 legislative elections, which one analysis found could shift six seats to the Democrats. Democrats are currently only one seat away from taking control of the state house and senate, which would give them control over the redistricting process in 2021, when new lines are drawn.

Republicans in the Virginia House hired Thomas Hofeller, the Republican gerrymandering mastermind who was a key figure behind the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, to defend their maps, but the federal court disagreed with his conclusions.

Because this case was decided on technical grounds, it may not shed any light on the other high-profile voting cases before the Supreme Court, as the justices weigh the fate of partisan gerrymandering and the census citizenship question.

*This post has been corrected to note which justices joined the majority opinion </s> Supreme Court Hands Democrats A Win On Racial Gerrymandering In Virginia

Enlarge this image toggle caption Jacquelyn Martin/AP Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Legislative districts in Virginia that the Supreme Court previously said were racially gerrymandered have to remain in their redrawn form, the court said Monday, giving Democrats in the state a victory.

The majority decision was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who noted that because the entirety of state government wasn't suing to keep the fight going — the case was brought by the state's GOP-controlled House — then it is throwing the case out.

"In short, Virginia would rather stop than fight on," Ginsburg wrote. "One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process."

The court previously decided that 11 districts in the state were sorted by race and they had to be redrawn. They were redrawn, and then the state's GOP-controlled House intervened to take it to the Supreme Court.

The case was 5-4, but not along the usual conservative-liberal lines. Instead, the majority in this case was Ginsburg with liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, as well as conservatives Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

For the number of cases remaining, the court appeared to be clearing out the underbrush Monday. It decided four cases, and none of them in a major way. It also punted a controversial Oregon cake-shop case — dealing with gay rights vs. religious freedom — sending it back to a lower court.

And it did nothing yet on Trump administration appeals of lower-court rulings that his administration violated the law on DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The court could deal with it by the end of the term, possibly next week.

This now leaves 20 undecided cases — 11 of which could be major decisions — and just one scheduled decision day remaining: June 24.

The court's schedule, however, is all but certain to change, adding more decision days next week. </s> WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dismissed the challenge to a lower court's findings that some of Virginia's legislative districts were racially gerrymandered, saying Monday that House Republicans did not have legal standing to challenge the decision.

The decision could give an advantage to the state's Democrats. All 140 seats in the legislature are on the ballot this fall, and the GOP holds two-seat majorities in both the House (51-49) and the Senate (21-19).

Democrats have been hoping that a wave of successes in recent Virginia elections will propel them to control of the legislature for the first time since 1995.

The party that controls the General Assembly in 2021 will oversee the next statewide redistricting effort, following next year's census — potentially cementing an advantage in future elections.

Primaries were held last week in the new districts.

The case split the court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in the 5- 4 case, saying that House Republican leaders could not challenge the court ruling because they did not represent the commonwealth.

The state's attorney general declined to continue the case, Ginsburg wrote.

"The State of Virginia would rather stop than fight on," she wrote. "One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process."

She was joined in an unusual alignment by Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch.

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. dissented, saying he saw no support "for the proposition that Virginia law bars the House from defending, in its own right, the constitutionality of a districting plan." He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh.

Because the state did not draw a new map after the decision by the panel of judges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the judges had an outside expert draw a new map.

It realigns a total of 26 House districts as it remedies the 11 under court order. Six Republican delegates would find themselves in districts with a majority of Democratic voters, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.

House Republicans pointed out that the political boundaries they drew in 2011 won support from most Democratic legislators, including Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, who were then state senators. They noted that the plan was approved by the Justice Department under President Barack Obama.

Mark Herring, the state attorney general, has argued that only his office has standing to represent the state in such a case, and it has opted not to appeal. The Trump administration filed a friend-of-the-court brief that essentially agrees with that position, saying that the House of Delegates as an institution has no inherent interest in the shape of its districts or who gets elected to represent them.

Not surprisingly, Virginia Democrats and Republicans had opposite reactions.

"Today's Supreme Court ruling is a victory for democracy and voting rights in our Commonwealth," Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said in a written statement. "When we corrected racially gerrymandered districts earlier this year, we righted a wrong — as I have always said, voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around. I am pleased that this fall, every Virginian, no matter who they are or where they live, will cast their ballots in fair and constitutional districts."

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said the decision will have effects beyond Virginia.

"The broader implications of this holding will reverberate across the states, touching virtually every area of politically charged law," he said in a statement. "The Court has sown to the winds of expediency and will reap a whirlwind of partisan mischief as state attorneys general pick and choose which laws they will defend and which they will disregard on behalf of those plaintiffs with which they are politically or ideologically aligned."

House Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, said he was "disappointed" with the ruling and noted that it hinged on the question of the chamber's standing rather than the merits of what he described in a written statement as a "constitutionally enacted redistricting plan."

He blamed the state's attorney general for declining to defend the maps, which, he noted, had been passed in 2011 "with an overwhelming majority."

The Supreme Court has already considered the 2011 legislative map once. It told a lower court to consider whether some of the districts for the Virginia House of Delegates were racially gerrymandered, by grouping black voters together in a way that left white candidates able to prevail elsewhere. As a practical matter, such a result would benefit Republicans.

The case is Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill. </s> Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday tossed out a lawsuit in Virginia over political boundaries for its state Legislature.

By a 5-4 vote — but not strictly along the usual conservative/liberal divide — the court said Virginia's House of Delegates did not have the legal right to carry on a fight over the map once state officials bowed out.

The dispute arose after the last census when the Republican-controlled Legislature redrew the district lines for the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates. In response to a lawsuit, a federal court declared the map invalid, concluding that it unconstitutionally sorted voters based on race. A redrawn map was seen as more favorable to Democrats.

Virginia's attorney general declined to appeal, and the House of Delegates picked up the fight. But the Supreme Court said a single house of the Legislature had no authority to do so.

"The House observes that Virginia gives redistricting authority to the 'General Assembly.' True enough," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote. But, she said, "One house of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process."

She was joined by two of the court's other liberals, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, but also by two of the court's most conservative members, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

"It's unfortunate that House Republicans wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and months of litigation in a futile effort to protect racially gerrymandered districts, but the good news is that this fall's elections will take place in constitutionally drawn districts," Herring said.

Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general during the Obama administration, called the decision "an important victory for African Americans in Virginia who have been forced since 2011 to vote in racially gerrymandered districts that unfairly diluted their voting power."

"With a new, fair map in place, all Virginians will now — finally — have the opportunity this fall to elect a House of Delegates that actually represents the will of the people," Holder said.

Monday's decision will have no practical effect, because the Supreme Court had earlier allowed elections to proceed using the redrawn map that the House of Delegates opposed. </s> The constitutional law of partisan gerrymandering is one of the major issues facing the U.S. Supreme Court in its current term. But today it dealt with a politically significant case involving the older issue of racial gerrymandering — and did so in a manner that avoided the merits of the controversy. A lower court’s ruling that a Republican-drawn state legislative map represented an unconstitutional racial gerrymander was sustained by a 5-4 SCOTUS majority on grounds that the GOP-controlled House of Delegates (whose district lines were subsequently modified by court order) did not have standing to file an appeal over the wishes of the state’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring.

Virginia Republicans claimed the lower court ruling contradicted an earlier preclearance of the legislative map by Barack Obama’s Justice Department when it was first drawn up in 2011. But in an opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court majority held that “[u]nder Virginia law, authority and responsibility for representing the State’s interests in civil litigation rest exclusively with the State’s Attorney General.” So Herring’s predictable decision to accept a ruling benefiting Virginia Democrats was, in this view, the final word on the subject. An unusual coalition on the Court provided the majority: Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, along with Ginsburg’s usual allies Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, concurred with the decision. Samuel Alito wrote a dissent suggesting that this decision damaged the Virginia legislature’s essential integrity, and he was joined in that dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh.

The timing of this decision is significant. Republicans hold a two-seat majority in the House of Delegates which the revised district lines imperiled in the state’s off-year elections this November (placing six GOP incumbents in majority-Democratic districts). If Democrats can flip the House (and also the state Senate, where Republicans also have a narrow majority), they will gain trifecta control over Virginia’s post-2020 redistricting process. Had Republicans prevailed at SCOTUS, Virginia’s legislative elections might have been thrown into chaos: Primaries using the revised lines were held just last week.

So Virginia’s GOP was essentially dealt a technical knockout by SCOTUS, and looking forward, we know that states with divided partisan control need to look to their own laws to determine which elected officials have the right to conduct litigation on their behalf. </s> WASHINGTON — Virginians will elect members of the House of Delegates this year using a map seen as favorable to Democrats as a result of a ruling Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The political boundaries are important because Republicans currently control the House by a slim majority. Only four states are having legislative elections this year. Virginia is the only one where Democrats have a chance of flipping control of the House and Senate.

The high court’s 5-4 decision was perhaps telegraphed by the fact that the justices previously allowed election planning to go forward with the new map. Virginia held its primary last week, and the November general election will be the last time the state uses this map because legislative districts will need to be redrawn to account for results from the 2020 census.

The justices let stand a lower court decision putting the new map in place, saying the Republican-controlled state House did not have a right to represent the state’s interests in an appeal to the Supreme Court. The state could have decided to bring the case but did not, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote.

“One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process,” she wrote. The four justices joining her were Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, a lineup that included conservatives and liberals. Dissenting were Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh.

The case stemmed from a map drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2011, after the last census, and used in the four elections since. Democratic voters sued in 2014, accusing Republicans of packing black voters into certain districts to make surrounding ones whiter and more Republican.

A lower court ruled 2-1 last year that the previous map drawn by lawmakers improperly factored race into drawing 11 of the 100 House districts. After lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a redistricting plan, the lower court chose a new map from a series of proposals submitted by a special master.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat, called the ruling a “big win for democracy in Virginia.”

“It’s unfortunate that House Republicans wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and months of litigation in a futile effort to protect racially gerrymandered districts,” he said in a statement.

The lawsuit challenging the original House lines was backed by the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The group targets elections for governors and state legislators, court cases or ballot initiative to give Democrats more control during the next round of congressional redistricting after the 2020 Census.

“With a new, fair map in place, all Virginians will now – finally – have the opportunity this fall to elect a House of Delegates that actually represents the will of the people,” Holder said in a statement.

House Republicans said they are disappointed by the ruling and criticized the “shadowy organization funded by out-of-state interests” that funded the lawsuit. But Republicans said they still expect to maintain their majority based on their track record of “common sense” leadership.

“Today’s ruling from SCOTUS will make victory in November even sweeter,” the House GOP caucus tweeted, adding in a statement: “We are confident that voters will opt for the leadership and results we have delivered over chaos, embarrassment, and unchecked Democratic control of state government.”

The case is Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, 18-281. </s> WASHINGTON (AP) — Virginians will elect members of the House of Delegates using a map seen as favorable to Democrats, according to ruling Monday by the Supreme Court.

The 5-4 decision was perhaps telegraphed by the fact that the justice previously allowed election planning to go forward with the new map.

Virginia held its primary last week, and the November general election will be the last time the state uses this map because legislative districts will need to be redrawn to account for results from the 2020 census.

The political boundaries are important because Republicans currently control the House by a 51-49 margin.

The justices let stand a lower court decision putting in place the new map, saying Republicans in the state House did not have right to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The state could have decided to bring the case but did not, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote.

“One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue the litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process,” she wrote.

The four justices who joined her were Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, a lineup that included conservatives and liberals.

Dissenting were Chief Justice John Roberts and three other justices — Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh.

The case stemmed from a map drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2011, after the last census, and used in the four elections since.

Democratic voters sued in 2014, accusing Republicans of packing black voters into certain districts to make surrounding ones whiter and more Republican.

A lower court ruled 2-1 last year that the previous, legislative-crafted map improperly factored race into the drawing of 11 of the 100 House districts.

After lawmakers were unable to reach an agreement on a redistricting plan, the lower court chose a new map from a series of proposals submitted by a special master.

The case is VA House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, 18-281. </s> On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, shutting down the Virginia GOP’s last ditch effort to rig the upcoming state legislative election taking place this November.

In 5-4 decision, the justices held that the House of Delegates has no standing to appeal the decision made by the lower court. The vote broke along unusual lines, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing for a majority with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, and Justice Samuel Alito writing a dissent joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh.

The case stemmed from a challenge to the GOP-drawn House of Delegates legislative map in Virginia, which residents challenged as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 12 of the 100 districts contained a voting base that was more than 55 percent African-American, raising concerns that lawmakers deliberately crammed as many black voters into as few districts as possible so they could not have as many representatives as their presence in the population.

A district court previously ruled all 12 of the districts unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court in 2017 approved one of them and told the lower court to use a different standard to review the other 11. The district court once again found the remaining 11 unconstitutional, and ordered a new map to be drawn. Democratic state Attorney General Mark Herring refused to defend the GOP’s gerrymander, leading the legislature to hire its own lawyers — which the Supreme Court today ruled was not allowed.

The decision was not altogether surprising, as the new state legislative map is already in place and primaries have already been held. The Supreme Court typically does not intervene in elections halfway through the process, so it is likely the justices would have issued their opinion sooner if they had wanted to rule in favor of the GOP.

The ruling is a huge victory for Virginia Democrats, who will now be competing with a fair map that will have considerably more competitive districts. Democrats only need to swing two seats in the state Senate and House of Delegates to win control of either chamber. Winning both would give them their only legislature in a Southern state, and leave the Minnesota Senate as the only GOP-controlled legislative chamber in a state President Donald Trump lost.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to decide three more major voting rights cases this term: Rucho v. Common Cause, which concerns a Republican partisan gerrymander in North Carolina, Lamone v Benisek, which concerns a Democratic partisan gerrymander in Maryland, and Department of Commerce v. New York, which will decide whether the Trump administration can interrogate people about citizenship while conducting the 2020 Census. </s> Zolnierek/iStock(WASHINGTON) — A narrowly-divided Supreme Court on Monday dismissed an appeal from Virginia’s Republican-controlled House of Delegates which sought to reinstate the state’s legislative districts map after it was struck down for improper racial gerrymandering.

A lower court held that 11 state legislative districts represented unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The state attorney general, a Democrat, declined to challenge the lower court decision.

On Monday, in a 5-4 decision, the court said the House of Delegates lacked standing to bring the case.

“The House, as a single chamber of a bicameral legislature, has no standing to appeal the invalidation of the redistricting plan separately from the state of which it is a part,” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the majority.

“This is likely good news for the Democratic Party in Virginia – it means that the Republican-drawn map at issue in this case cannot be used in the 2019 Virginia state elections,” said ABC News legal analyst Kate Shaw.

Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam said the ruling means the state’s new electoral map, drawn by a court-appointed overseer, will stand.

“Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a victory for democracy and voting rights in our Commonwealth,” said Governor Ralph Northam. “When we corrected racially gerrymandered districts earlier this year, we righted a wrong—as I have always said, voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.”

The decision also impacts the electoral landscape in Virginia, a key swing state, on the eve of the 2020 presidential election.

All seats in the Virginia legislature are on the ballot in November. The outcome will determine party control of the state chambers headed into the 2020 census and next redistricting – the chance to reshape Assembly and congressional maps for a decade.

Virginia has been ranked as one of the most gerrymandered states in the country with districts drawn in many cases specifically to minimize the electoral influence of black Democratic voters, according to the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

Last year, a lower court sided with the challengers to Virginia’s map, ruling that the state assembly failed to conduct a “holistic analysis” of racial considerations unique to each district. It ordered that a new map be drawn before the 2019 elections.

Defenders of the map insist race did not predominate other race-neutral considerations.

The high court’s ruling features an atypical vote alignment, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch joining Ginsburg in the majority, while Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh dissent.

“The Virginia House of Delegates exists for a purpose: to represent and serve the interests of the people of the Commonwealth,” Alito wrote in the dissent. “The invalidation of the House’s redistricting plan and its replacement with a court-ordered map would cause the House to suffer a ‘concrete’ injury” and give it grounds for bringing an appeal.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules, in a 5–4 decision, the Virginia legislative districts that the court previously said were racially gerrymandered, have to remain in their redrawn form. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch make up the majority, not the usual conservative-liberal grouping.