{"id":180610,"date":"2017-03-01T19:57:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T00:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/03\/01\/well-here-is-some-good-news-to-start-the-month\/"},"modified":"2017-03-01T19:57:00","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T00:57:00","slug":"well-here-is-some-good-news-to-start-the-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/03\/01\/well-here-is-some-good-news-to-start-the-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Well, Here is Some Good News to Start the Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court just remanded the Virginia redistricting case back to a lower court with instructions to apply a more rigorous standard regarding racial bias<\/a>. <\/p>\n

It wasn’t a complete victory, but it was a definite win for the good guys:<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Virginia Democrats a fresh chance to challenge parts of the legislative map for the state\u2019s House of Delegates.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cThe upshot of all of this is that not much has changed with these cases,\u201d Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a blog post. \u201cThe fight will be over the details and application to particular cases.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Marc E. Elias, a lawyer for the challengers in the case, disagreed, calling the decision a \u201cmajor victory\u201d that will help Democrats.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>In 2015, a divided three-judge panel of Federal District Court in Richmond, Va., upheld 11 of the challenged districts because, it said, race had not been the primary factor in drawing them. Since the districts could be justified under traditional redistricting criteria like compactness, contiguity, incumbency protection and political considerations, the court said, race could not have been the predominant reason for drawing them.<\/span>

<\/span>That was the wrong approach, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. \u201cThe racial predominance inquiry concerns the actual considerations that provided the essential basis for the lines drawn,\u201d he wrote, \u201cnot post hoc justifications the legislature in theory could have used but in reality did not.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>In assessing those challenges, Justice Kennedy wrote, the trial court identified \u201cno fewer than 11 race neutral redistricting factors.\u201d He called that kind of analysis too malleable.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cBy deploying those factors in various combinations and permutations, a state could construct a plethora of potential maps that look consistent with traditional, race-neutral principles,\u201d Justice Kennedy wrote. \u201cBut if race for its own sake is the overriding reason for choosing one map over others, race still may predominate.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Justice Kennedy did not say the challengers would win under his less rigid standard. \u201cThe district court,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis best positioned to determine in the first instance the extent to which, under the proper standard, race directed the shape of these 11 districts.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>The Supreme Court affirmed one part of the trial court\u2019s ruling, concerning a single district, which the trial court had upheld even after finding that race played the dominant role in drawing it. The trial court said the district was justified by an attempt to comply with the Voting Rights Act, which forbade the reduction of minority voters\u2019 ability to elect candidates of their choice.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Redistricting is still a mess, but it is a bit less of a mess, and it appears that racial Gerrymanders have become more difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court just remanded the Virginia redistricting case back to a lower court with instructions to apply a more rigorous standard regarding racial bias. It wasn’t a complete victory, but it was a definite win for the good guys: The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Virginia Democrats a fresh chance to challenge parts of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[413,407,536,639],"class_list":["post-180610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-civil-rights","tag-justice","tag-race","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180610"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}