Federal appeals court deals major blow to Voting Rights Act

A federal appeals court on Wednesday shut down the ability of private 
individuals to bring Voting Rights Act lawsuits challenging election 
policies that allegedly discriminate based on race in several states, a 
major blow to the civil rights law that has long been under conservative 
attack.

The ruling, which leaves enforcement of the VRA’s key provision to the US 
attorney general, comes as the Trump Justice Department is gutting its 
civil rights division and pivoting away from the traditional voting rights 
work. The DOJ, for instance, dropped major lawsuits previously brought 
against Texas and Georgia.

The new ruling from the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals covers the seven 
midwestern states covered in the St. Louis-based Circuit. The opinion 
means that in those states, only the Justice Department can bring lawsuits 
enforcing a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, which was passed by 
Congress in 1965 to address racial discrimination in election policies.

The 2-1 ruling from the 8th Circuit said that a separate civil rights law, 
known as Section 1983, did not give private individuals the right to bring 
VRA cases. That question had been left unanswered in a previous ruling 
from the circuit that said the VRA itself conferred no private right of 
action.

Those rulings cut against decades of cases successfully brought by 
individual voters to challenge election policies that violate the VRA by 
discriminating based on race. Several of the cases traveled up to the 
Supreme Court and produced rulings affirming the lower court decisions in 
the voters’ favor, supporting the long-term understanding that the VRA 
gave private individuals ability to enforce the law with lawsuits.

While some conservative justices have questioned whether such private 
lawsuits could be brought under the VRA, the high court has never 
addressed the question directly.

The 8th Circuit’s Wednesday opinion, written by George W. Bush-appointee 
Raymond Gruender and joined by Donald Trump appointee Jonathan Kobes, 
concluded that Congress had not “unambiguously” conferred a private right 
of action in the VRA text, while asserting that it needed to do so under 
Supreme Court precedent.

A dissent from 8th Circuit Chief Judge Steve Colloton, a George W. Bush 
appointee, pushed back on that reasoning.

“Since 1982, private plaintiffs have brought more than 400 actions based 
on §2 that have resulted in judicial decisions. The majority concludes 
that all of those cases should have been dismissed because §2 of the 
Voting Rights Act does not confer a voting right,” Colloton wrote.

The new ruling stems from a lawsuit alleging that North Dakota 
discriminated against Native Americans in its state legislative 
redistricting plan.

“If left intact, this radical decision will hobble the most important 
anti-discrimination voting law by leaving its enforcement to government 
attorneys whose ranks are currently being depleted,” Mark Graber, senior 
director for redistricting at Campaign Legal Center, which is representing 
the Native Americans, said in a statement. “The immediate victims of 
today’s decision are North Dakota’s Native American voters, who a trial 
court found were subjected to a map that discriminated against them on 
account of race.”

North Dakota’s Secretary of State office, which was defending the maps, 
did not respond to CNN’s inquiry.

If they seek to appeal the ruling, the Native American voters could seek a 
review by the full 8th Circuit – a court made up of almost entirely of GOP 
appointees – or they could take it straight to the Supreme Court, and its 
6-3 conservative majority.

The latter path risks the gamble that the conservative majority would 
adopt the conclusions of the 8th Circuit panel, which would end nationwide 
privately brought lawsuits under the VRA’s relevant provision and leave 
that provision’s enforcement to the US attorney general alone.

Meanwhile, there has been a mass exodus under the second Trump 
administration of career officials in the DOJ Civil Rights Division, which 
houses the department’s voting section, and the Department has been 
backing out of longstanding voting rights cases.

In 2013, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted a separate 
section of the VRA that required states with a history of racial 
discrimination in voting practices to get federal approval for changes in 
election policy.

CNN’s Ethan Cohen contributed to this report.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/federal-appeals-court-deals-major-
blow-to-voting-rights-act/ar-AA1EN4zO