The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday said a federal court in Richmond must take another look at a ruling that had ordered the state legislature to redraw the lines of Virginia’s only black-majority congressional district.
The high court’s decision comes after last week’s ruling in which the justices sided with black officeholders and Democrats in Alabama. In that case, the Supreme Court told a lower court to reconsider whether a redistricting plan drawn by the state’s Republican legislature packed minority voters into districts to dilute their influence.
The action in the Virginia case “was not entirely unexpected,” said Henry L. Chambers Jr., a professor of constitutional law at the University of Richmond.
“It’s not that the justices are saying it doesn’t make sense to redraw the lines” of Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District, he said. “It may well be that they are suggesting that they want the district court to be clearer of what exactly the General Assembly needs to do.”
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Chambers worked in the Attorney General’s Office on the preclearance of the congressional districting plan three years ago.
Last summer, a three-judge panel from the Eastern District of Virginia tossed out the boundaries of the 3rd Congressional District, which spans from Norfolk to Richmond, saying that it wrongly packs African-Americans into a single district.
Eight current and former Republican Virginia congressmen urged the high court to reverse the lower court’s ruling that faulted the Virginia plan.
Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, a Democrat from Newport News, has represented the 3rd since 1993.
Virginia redraws its congressional and legislative districts after each decennial census, taking into consideration population shifts in the previous 10 years. The procedure opens a door for lawmakers to gerrymander the districts to their partisan advantage.
The 2012 redistricting plan that then-Gov. Bob McDonnell signed increased the number of voting-age African-Americans in Scott’s district by 44,711.
The complaint — brought forward by three voters residing in the district — alleges that by changing the district’s boundaries, the assembly decreased the black population in the surrounding districts, diluting minority influence there.
“The problem with Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District is that the General Assembly did the same thing here that they did in Alabama, only to a lesser degree,” Chambers said.
“The district could have had fewer African-Americans in it, but the General Assembly wanted to keep the number higher than it needed in order to allow for minorities in the district to elect their representative of choice.”
Del. William J. Howell, R-Stafford, speaker of the House of Delegates, on Monday declined to comment on the decision. In February, Howell said the House “fully intends to exercise its legal right to attempt to remedy any legal flaw ultimately found by the courts with respect to the current congressional districts.”
Last month, the district court extended the previous April 1 deadline for the assembly to redraw the districts to Sept. 1 to allow time for the U.S. Supreme Court to act, or within 60 days of a decision by the three-judge panel that will reconsider Virginia’s congressional redistricting plan.
Chambers said lawmakers should continue to work on redrawing the lines despite Monday’s ruling.
“I don’t think the Supreme Court is going to overturn what the district court did,” Chambers said. “I think the General Assembly is simply going to have a better list of requirements and a more specific judgment as to why precisely the court did what it did in the Virginia case.”
Separately, voters in 12 House of Delegates districts — half of them in the Richmond or Petersburg areas — filed suit in federal court in December to challenge the 2011 House redistricting plan. They said that plan illegally packed additional black voters in districts that had been represented primarily by racial minorities for decades.
A trial before a three-judge federal panel is scheduled for July in Alexandria.