Ballot Battle Heads to High Court
New Justice Neil Gorsuch could prove to be the wild card in Supreme Court voting rights battles.
By Joseph P. Williams, Staff Writer | Sept. 1, 2017, at 6:00 a.m.
It's been a tough summer at the federal courthouse for Texas Republicans.
Last week, a judge in Corpus Christi rejected the state's toughest-in-the-nation ballot ID law, declaring it a barely-disguised plan to put African-American and Hispanic voters at a disadvantage. A few weeks earlier, a three-judge panel in San Antonio ruled that state GOP lawmakers adopted legislative districts that intentionally diluted the voting strength of minorities, a clear violation of federal law.
Those setbacks on the right, however, were huge wins for voting-rights advocates: They prevailed in bright-red Texas despite a significantly weakened Voting Rights Act – and without the legal muscle of the Justice Department, which has opted out of the fight against discrimination at the ballot box.
Yet the victories are tempered by the fact that Republicans have vowed to appeal both cases to the Supreme Court, raising the very real possibility that the justices would agree to review and possibly reverse the lower-court decisions.
Upping the ante further: The Supreme Court's conservative majority has been reconstituted, and some say strengthened, with Justice Neil Gorsuch replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Add in the fact that the Wisconsin gerrymandering case Gill v. Whitford, a potential blockbuster, is already on the docket, and the Supreme Court's upcoming fall session is shaping up as one of its most consequential on the issue of voting rights and equal political representation.
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