Virginia 3rd District Case Before SCOTUS Tomorrow

Republicans may well see themselves set to lose a congressional district in Virginia and deservedly so given the obscene gerrymandering that was forced through by the Republican controlled House of Delegates.  Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case and Republicans will have to convince the Court - likely an impossible task given the even split now on the Court - that the deliberate loading of black voters into the 3rd District to create a safe district for Randy Forbes is not illegal.   Here are highlights from the Daily Press:

Virginia's long-running legal battle over the state's 3^rd Congressional District lines will be taken up Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court.

This is the last hurrah for Republican members of Congress hoping to block a redrawn map likely to send an extra Virginia Democrat to Congress later this year. Already U.S. Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott's old district has been found unconstitutional, twice, by a lower court.

The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, and set oral arguments for Monday. But the court declined to keep the old lines in place while the matter was pending. Election preparations are proceeding under the new lines a three judge panel approved in January.

The new map took black voters out of Scott's district, moving them to the 4^th District and making it a likely Democratic pickup.

The high court's decision to proceed toward June Congressional primaries with that new map in place signaled, to some, that reversal is unlikely. But the court is hard to predict, though Justice Antonin Scalia's death last month changed the math.

With his seat vacant, eight justices will hear the case.  "I think it's a four-four issue at best," said Brian Cannon, executive director of OneVirginia2021, a redistricting reform group that has a separate lawsuit targeting House of Delegates districts in Virginia.

"I think the new districts will stay in place," Cannon predicted.

Federal Judges Change Gerymandered Virginia Congressional Districts

Change in Districts - watch the boundaries shift

As noted in prior posts, I once lived in the 2nd Virginia Congressional District until Republicans gerrymandered Virginia's congressional districts to lump blacks - and in my case white liberal neighborhoods - into a few districts in order to protect incumbent Republicans.  Thus, I suddenly found myself in the 3rd District rather than the 2nd District.  Now, after federal lawsuits were filed challenging the GOP's grotesque district boundaries, a panel of federal court judges has redrawn the boundaries for the 3rd congressional district and those surrounding it, all of which are held by Republicans.  Will it change results in congressional races this November?  There's no guarantee, but if the Republicans win, their margins may be diminished. The district map above changes to show the new, compact and much more contiguous districts. Here are highlights from the Virginian Pilot: 

A federal court ordered a congressional redistricting Thursday that reassigned millions of voters and changed the racial and political makeup of districts served by Reps. Bobby Scott and Randy Forbes.

Federal judges in Richmond ordered state officials to use the new boundaries for this fall’s congressional elections.

While the changes were ordered in time for eligible candidates to file to run, the judges' order could be stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear opposition arguments from lawyers for the state's eight Republican members of Congress.

Unless the high court halts the order, the 3rd District, represented by Scott, will lose its black majority, shrinking from 56 percent black to 45 percent. At the same time, the white majority in Forbes' 4th District shrinks from 63 percent to 51 percent, giving black voters more clout.

The 3rd, which currently stretches from Newport News to Richmond, will become more centralized in Hampton Roads. It will take in all or part the cities of Portsmouth, Norfolk, Suffolk, Hampton and Newport News and Isle of Wight County. Scott lives in Newport News.

The 4th District continues to represent Chesapeake, Forbes' hometown, but loses part of Suffolk and Isle of Wight County. The cities of Richmond and Petersburg - both with significant black populations - had been part of Scott's district but will move to Forbes' district.

The 2nd's population remains concentrated in Virginia Beach but the district's territory has been expanded to include the Williamsburg, York County, part of James City County and nearby communities. It also loses a chunk of its Newport News precincts.

I suspect that Randy Forbes is not trilled that he might actually have to strive to represent all voters in his district and not just the Christofascists and white supremacists.

Democrats Unveil a Plan to Fight GOP Gerrymandering

Thanks to cynical district gerrymandering Republicans have managed to hold far more state level and congressional districts than they by rights should hold.  In Virginia the problem is especially egregious and one congressional district has been ruled illegal and a court challenge to state level districts is underway.  Should the districts be struck down and rational, geographically compact districts be put in place, the power of the GOP would be severely lessened.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the Democrat effort to end shameless gerrymandering.  Here are highlights:

The Democratic Governors Association is creating a fund dedicated to winning races in states where governors have some control over congressional redistricting, the party’s first step in a long-range campaign to make control of the House more competitive.

 

Billed as “Unrig the Map,” the effort will target 18 of the 35 states in which governors play a role in redistricting, and where new congressional maps could allow Democrats to win House seats that are now drawn in a way to favor Republicans. The fund will be used for governors’ races over the next five years, leading up to the 2020 census.

 

Democratic officials said that they hoped to raise “tens of millions” for the effort and that they believed they could gain as many as 44 House seats if lines were more favorably redrawn in the 18 battleground states. Many of those states still have Republican-controlled legislatures, but with Democratic governors in place they could at least veto the next round of congressional maps and send the disputes to the courts.

 

The fund-raising effort is to be overseen by Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia and Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights.

 

The push is rooted in the 2010 elections, which were devastating to Democrats not only because they suffered deep losses but also because Republican victories in governors’ races and gains the party made in controlling state legislatures that year enabled Republicans to dominate redistricting in many states, achieving what could be a decade-long hold on the House.

 

Democrats won over a million more votes in House races than Republicans but still could not reclaim a majority, in part because of Republican-led redistricting.

 

Both parties operate networks of political committees intended to channel national money into governor and state legislative races. But the Republican version is far better financed: The Republican Governors Association, for example, spent $170 million during the 2014 cycle, compared with $98 million for the Democratic Governors Association.

 

Democratic governors and strategists have often complained that their donors are too focused on more glamorous presidential and Senate races, while Republicans have been pouring money into state-level contests.

 

But Mr. McAuliffe acknowledged that the Democrats had not pushed their donors enough, either. “This effort is the first time the party has really taken a serious effort at winning these races,” he said.

Virginia Republicans' Worse Nightmare

Despite Virginia's rapidly changing demographics, the Virginia GOP has maintained a strangle hold on the House of Delegates in particular the old fashioned way - horrifically gerrymandered districts carefully crafted to insure GOP candidates are elected.  Now, with a federal court ruling striking down the 3rd Congressional district for being racially gerrymandered, the congressional districts will need to be redrawn.  Worse yet, there is the chance that the state districts might face a redrawing.  The later is a terrifying prospect for the Virginia GOP and, if it occurs, could end GOP control.  Here are highlights from the Richmond Times Dispatch:

[P]ublic bravado notwithstanding, Republicans are scared — very scared.

The calendar, the complexion of the electorate and the issues could align next year in the Democrats’ favor if a federal court throws out Republican-drawn House of Delegates districts as racial gerrymandering and orders them reconfigured, presumably to be more competitive. A bigger if: The court orders special elections for the House, concurrent with presidential balloting.

This is Speaker Bill Howell’s nightmare.

The advantages Republicans enjoy this legislative cycle will evaporate if they are forced to defend their House majority in elections in new districts held at the same time that Virginia’s Democratic reflex peaks: during statewide contests; specifically, for president. In national elections, turnout here is its highest — 70 percent or more.

When that occurs, the temperament of the electorate is more moderate, if not outright liberal. That’s why Barack Obama carried Virginia in 2008 — the first Democrat to win the state for the presidency since 1964. Obama won here again in 2012, affirming Virginia’s status as a competitive, nationally prized swing state.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that a strong Democratic presidential nominee could pull in a couple more Democratic congressmen or -women (a federal court, in a separate redistricting case, has ordered new lines, but Republicans are appealing) and a slew of Democratic delegates — should there be special elections for the legislature.

Here’s why “slew” may be the appropriate word: There are 27 Republican-held House districts that Obama won in 2012 or lost narrowly. Not all are in deep blue Northern Virginia. According to the Virginia Public Access Project, Obama carried 16 Republican districts, in some, with approximately 60 percent of the vote. He lost the remaining 11 with no less than about 45 percent.

This speaks to the cynical marvel that is hyper-partisan redistricting.

It’s not something they [Republicans] discuss publicly. For a long time, their virtual silence on redistricting was guided by legal considerations. The less Republicans said on the record, the less that could used against them in the Alexandria courtroom, where three federal judges recently heard a Democratic lawsuit challenging the 2011 House of Delegates map.

The judges won’t have a decision for at least a month. If it’s adverse to Republicans, they are certain to appeal. The next stop would be the U.S. Supreme Court, where their first plea in the congressional redistricting case was unsuccessful.  

Why the Fate of Virginia’s Congressional Map Matters

Here in Virginia despite changing demographics and urban growth that are hostile to the policies of the Virginia GOP, Republicans remain in a stranglehold over the House of Delegates and a disproportionate number of Congressional seats remain in Republican hands. How has this happened?  One word describes the problem: gerrymandering.  State and congressional districts were carefully draw to give Republicans an advantage so that minorities and "liberal" areas were packed into a small number of districts.  Now, Virginia's congressional district map is facing revision after court rulings struck down the horrifically drawn 3rd District that is pictured above (I live in the 3rd district, but used to be in the 2nd until it was redrawn to protect Republican Scott Rigell).  A piece in MSNBC looks at why the outcome of this redistricting matters.  Here are excerpts:

When voters in Virginia went to the polls in 2012, a narrow majority backed President Obama’s re-election bid, just as they’d done four years earlier. In a closely watched U.S. Senate race, the commonwealth’s voters also elected Sen. Tim Kaine (D) over former Sen. George Allen (R) by about six points.

 

But just a little further down on the ballot is where things get tricky. If you add up all the votes case in each of Virginia’s U.S. House races, roughly 49% of Virginians voted for Democratic candidates, while about 51% supported Republican candidates. The state has 11 congressional districts, so if there was some kind of parallel between voter preferences and partisan results, we might expect to see five Democrats head to Congress from the state, along with six Republicans.

 

Except that’s not what happened. Of Virginia’s 11 U.S. House seats, Democrats ended up with three victories to the GOP’s eight. Dems may have won nearly 49% of the vote, but they also won about 27% of the representation.

After the 2010 Census, Virginia’s Republican-dominated state government carefully crafted a district map intended to maximize GOP victories. How? Step one, of course, was drawing lines in such a way as to keep as many African-American voters together as possible, effectively creating noncompetitive districts.

 

Late last week, this map ran into some trouble. The Washington Post reported:

A panel of federal judges issued a ruling Friday that Virginia lawmakers illegally concentrated African American voters into one congressional district to reduce their influence elsewhere, bringing the state a step closer to being forced to redraw its election map.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia affirmed its earlier decision and ordered the Virginia House of Delegates to redraw the state’s 11-district congressional map by Sept. 1.

 It’s not yet resolved – an appeal is inevitable – but this has the potential to be a pretty big deal.

If you’re thinking this might be a contentious process, you’re not alone. As the Post’s report added, “Democrats and advocates for reducing the influence of politics on redistricting applauded Friday’s decision. And they could benefit politically: Diluting the African American makeup of the state’s black-majority district would make adjacent districts less Republican and potentially vulnerable to Democratic challenge.”

 

If appeals fail, Virginia lawmakers would have to return for a special session this summer.

The approach of today's Virginia GOP is that if you cannot win because of your policies and agenda, you win by disenfranchising minorities and gerrymandering the districts.

U.S. Supreme Court Remands 3rd District Gerrymandering Case

As noted in previous posts, when Virginia redrew its congressional districts, the Virginia GOP took great care to gerrymander the 3rd District - in which I now reside - to shift as many minority voters and liberal voters into the redrawn 3rd District as possible to make the 2nd District safer for Scott Rigell and the 4th District safer for religious nutcase Randy Forbes.  A panel of district court judges found the redrawn 3rd District - which isn't even contiguous - to be unconstitutional.  The GOP appealed and now the U.S. Supreme Court has sent the case back to the lower court where it is likely to be struck down again and thereby force a redrawing of congressional districts on more proper basis.  The Daily Press looks at the high court's action.  Here are highlights:

The U.S. Supreme Court sent Virginia's 3rd District gerrymander case back down the pipe on Monday, a move that brings Virginia another step closer to a redraw of its congressional map.

The nation's highest court vacated and remanded a three-judge panel's decision in the case, which alleges that state leaders focused on race when lines were drawn for the 3rd District. The district is represented by U.S. Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott, D-Newport News, and it meanders back and forth across the James River, taking in minority populations from Hampton Roads to Richmond.

It's part of a map that led to an 8-3 split, in favor of Republicans, for Virginia's congressional delegation, despite a statewide electorate that has leaned slightly toward Democrats in recent years.

Voters, backed by a Democratic law firm that targets redistricting cases, alleged that minority voting strength was diluted in surrounding districts by the 3rd District gerrymander, and a panel of three federal judges in Richmond agreed last year, ordering the legislature to draw a new map.

That triggered the U.S. Supreme Court appeal by Republican members of Congress looking to protect the current map.

Monday's remand will likely lead federal judges here to re-affirm their initial order, according to Marc Elias, lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

"The Alabama decision supports our position," Elias said in an email. "We expect the three-judge panel to reach the same result now that Alabama has been decided."

The decision may also impact a separate case, alleging similar racial gerrymanders in a number of House of Delegates districts, including two on the Peninsula.

Any redraw would impact not just Scott's district, but surrounding ones and, potentially, every congressional district in the state.

Plaintiffs argue that mapmakers packed black voters into one heavily minority district in order to make surrounding districts less competitive and, thus, safer for Republican candidates.

Today's Virginia GOP cannot win on the issues, so voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandered districts are required to maintain a false GOP majority.   Sadly, I don't see the Virginia GOP - or national GOP - changing unless and until the Christofascist and Tea Party loons are exiled to the political wilderness where they belong.

Supreme Court Reasserts Voting Rights Act

Gerrymandered Virginia 3rd District - note how parts are not even contiguous

When the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated Section 5 of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, many racists conservatives joyfully hoped that the Court was on a track to destroying the Act entirely.  Now, in a ruling Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, the Court seemingly sent a message that it is not ready to open the doors to a return of Jim Crow era gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement. And here in Virginia, the ruling may be very meaningful in the challenge to the GOP gerrymandered 3rcd Congressional District which was carefully draw to loan minority voters into one district and favor Republicans in the surrounding districts.  Here are highlights from Politico:

The Supreme Court stopped just short of ruling Alabama’s redistricting plan unconstitutional on Wednesday, but it sent a clear message to lawmakers across the country that the Voting Rights Act can’t be used to justify maps that predominately group voters together based on their race.

In a 5-4 ruling, the high court sided with black lawmakers and Democrats in Alabama in throwing out a lower court’s decision that upheld the GOP-drawn state legislative map. This was the court’s second high-stakes decision in two years dealing with the Voting Rights Act and will likely have an effect on redistricting legal battles in states like Virginia and North Carolina.

The case was brought by African-American lawmakers in Alabama who argued that the Republican-controlled Legislature packed thousands of black voters into existing majority-black state legislative districts to secure a GOP-advantage in the other districts.

[T]he ruling simply called the lower court’s decision “legally erroneous” and sent the case back to it without ruling whether Alabama’s redistricting plan is unconstitutional.

“The appeals focus upon the appellants’ claims that new district boundaries create ‘racial gerrymanders’ in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority opinion. “We find that the District Court applied incorrect legal standards in evaluating the claims.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote on the case and joined the court’s four liberal justices to make up the majority.

But while Breyer only remanded the case backed to the lower court for further consideration, he strongly suggested that some of the districts should be deemed unconstitutional. “That Alabama expressly adopted and applied a policy of prioritizing mechanical racial targets above all other districting criteria (save one-person, one-vote) provides evidence that race motivated the drawing of particular lines in multiple districts in the State,” he wrote.

For partisan advantage, Republicans have historically tried to “pack” minorities into districts, while Democrats have attempted to “crack” majority-minority districts in the redistricting process to spread minorities into more districts to boost Democratic candidates, even at the expense of providing safer seats for minority candidates.

States lawmakers — of both parties — will now have to employ a much more nuanced way of using race in the redistricting process, said Justin Levitt, another redistricting expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who also worked as the Democratic National Committee’s National Voter Protection counsel in 2008.

“This isn’t a case about Alabama,” Levitt said. “It’s about how officials consider race. Other states have very similar philosophies as Alabama. The court today said, ‘Guess what? They’re wrong.’”

The court’s ruling is a victory for Democrats in Virginia, where a panel of federal judges ruled recently that the Republican-led Legislature’s decision to pack African-American voters into the 3rd Congressional District, which is represented by Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott, was motivated purely by race — a violation of the 14th Amendment.

Virginia’s Republican members of Congress appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The case has given Democrats a chance to push for new lines that could make at least two districts — the 2nd and 4th, currently represented by GOP Reps. Scott Rigell and Randy Forbes, respectively — more competitive once some of the black population from Scott’s district is moved.

“Similar to Alabama, here in Virginia we have suffered from racial gerrymandering by the GOP designed to dilute the voting power of minority voters,” said Morgan Finkelstein, spokeswoman for the Virginia Democratic Party. “Today’s ruling shows that the legal system — and the country — is paying more and more attention to this troubling issue. We need compact, contiguous districts and remain hopeful that Virginia Republicans will stop stalling and work with us towards achieving equal representation for all Virginians.” 

The husband and I used to be in the 2nd District until the Virginia Republicans redrew the boundaries of the 3rd district to move blacks - and certain liberal voting neighborhoods such as ours - into the 3rd district to provide safer seats to GOP Congressman Rigell and Forbes, both of whom need to be voted out of office in my opinion.

Panel of Federal Judges Declares Gerrymandered 3rd District Unconstitutional

The GOP approach to winning elections is to (i) disenfranchise as many voters as possible who might vote for Democrats and (ii) shamelessly gerrymander districts to protect Republicans.  The Virginia GOP has carefully implemented these nefarious methods.  The husband and I used to live in Virginia's 2nd congressional district until the GOP controlled House of Delegates redrew the lines of the district to protect GOP incumbent Scott Rigell.  Then suddenly, we found ourselves in the 3rd congressional district which had been carefully drawn to pack blacks into a single district and thereby improve the chances of GOP candidates in surrounding districts.  The map above shows the ridiculous boundaries of the 3rd district as redrawn.   Now, a panel of federal judges has declared the district as redrawn to be unconstitutional and ordered the General Assembly to revise it by next spring.  Sadly, that will not benefit voters in elections next month.  Both the Virginian Pilot and the Washington Post have details.  Here are highlights from the Pilot:

In a decision with potential implications for Virginia's congressional delegation, three federal judges ruled Tuesday that the lines of the state's 3rd Congressional District were drawn in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The panel of judges allowed next month's election to proceed under the existing district lines, but ordered the General Assembly to redraw them by April 1, in time for the next congressional election in 2016.

The 3rd District is the only one of Virginia's 11 congressional districts with an African American majority. It has been represented since 1992 by Rep. Bobby Scott, a Newport News Democrat who is unopposed in the Nov. 4 election.

In a 2-1 decision, the judges agreed with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed a year ago that the congressional redistricting plan adopted by the Republican-controlled Assembly in 2012 amounted to racial gerrymandering, packing African American voters into Scott's district and leaving adjoining districts safer for their Republican incumbents.

Moreover, the judges said, the 3rd District is marked by "an odd shape and a composition of a disparate chain of communities, predominantly African American, loosely connected by the James River."

The district, which stretches from Norfolk to Richmond, is the least-compact district in Virginia and splits more city and county boundaries than any other district, the judges said.

In order to comply with the panel's ruling, the legislature might have to pull some Democratic-leaning voters out of Scott's district and redistribute them to surrounding districts, possibly creating less-hospitable electoral terrain for Republican Reps. Randy Forbes of Chesapeake and Scott Rigell of Virginia Beach.

The Washington Post notes in part as follows:

Michael Kelly, a spokesman for Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D), said state lawyers were “reviewing the decision and assessing its impact and how best to move forward.” The attorney general’s office, in consultation with the Department of Elections, will decide whether to appeal, he said.

But there was broad agreement Tuesday that, if the decision is not appealed, its impact could ripple across several districts in the state. Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report tweeted this on Tuesday: “Depending on how VA’s map is redrawn for 2016, the big loser here could be #VA04 Rep. Randy Forbes (R).”

Republican reaction to the ruling was muted; a spokesman for Virginia House Speaker William J. Howell (Stafford) declined to comment. But privately, some members of the GOP conceded that the redrawn map would probably make at least one and possibly several heavily GOP districts competitive for Democrats. If the state doesn’t appeal, the General Assembly would address the process when it reconvenes in January.

Republicans and Democrats would be taking a big risk if they did not find a way to come to an agreement. If the GOP-controlled legislature did not pass a plan that McAuliffe would be willing to sign, more uncertainty could ensue: A veto from McAuliffe would send the map to the courts for the judges to redraw.

 Sadly, the Virginia GOP has become a coven of religious extremists and open racists that opposes rights for minorities of all stripes and which seeks to infuse Christofascist religious beliefs into the laws of the Commonwealth.  To truly move forward, Virginia needs to see the Virginia GOP as it currently exists wither and die.