Two Republican activists want the minority-majority subdistricts reversed, while the state wants the subdistricts upheld but without race-based justifications.
Observers are scratching their heads after Republican-dominated North Dakota recently took the unusual step of asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a redistricting lawsuit it won.
The Department of Justice has yet to weigh in on the appeal. On June 10, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to file a brief expressing its views on the case.
The redistricting plan approved by a lower court allows the state to create two new minority-majority state legislative subdistricts to help elect local Indians.
In the state’s eyes, the problem with the case it won is that a three-member panel of federal district judges assumed that attempting to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA) justifies racial discrimination in validating the new subdistricts.
The VRA, enacted in 1965, prohibits racial discrimination in voting, and was intended to enforce the 15th Amendment (1870) which forbids the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Hamline University professor David Schultz said the lawsuit is being used to undermine the VRA “to say that racial considerations cannot be used for any circumstances” when electoral district lines are drafted.
Kareem Crayton of the Brennan Center for Justice said there is a question whether states “are really learning the lessons that the Voting Rights Act was intended to help them embrace, which is you’ve got to treat communities of color as everyone else. They’re entitled to an opportunity to elect candidates.”
Steven Allen, a distinguished senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Capital Research Center, an investigative think tank, rejects that perspective on the VRA and suggests those who oppose the state’s action are doing so because they support more Democrat-heavy districts, which include minority enclaves.
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