SCOTUS ruled yesterday that a Texas county can use a map in the next election that judges had already ruled was racially gerrymandered. That's a feature, not a bug, right, guys? Via NBC News:
The court's three liberal justices dissented as the conservative majority in a brief order said Republican-led Galveston County could use a map drawn in 2021 that challengers said wiped out the county's only majority-minority precinct in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The map, the plaintiffs said, discriminates against both Black and Latino voters.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a brief dissenting opinion that the court's decision means that a map that a district court judge had subsequently approved, which will now not be used, was "concededly lawful ... and nearly identical to the maps that have governed the election of Galveston County's commissioners for decades." Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson both joined Kagan's opinion.
The court rejected emergency requests filed by voters and civil rights groups seeking to put on hold a ruling by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that requires the 2021 map to be used instead of the one ordered by the lower court judge.
