Federal appeals court deals major blow to Voting Rights Act
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.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
32 minutes ago
- USA Today
Speaker Johnson says Republicans will expand majority in 2026 election
Speaker Johnson says Republicans will expand majority in 2026 election House Speaker Mike Johnson said he expects Republicans to maintain or widen their majority in Congress in 2026. Straight Arrow News
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
Analysis: The behind-the-scenes power John Roberts wields to ensure his influence with justices
Chief Justice John Roberts often laments that he has limited clout as he deals with his eight Supreme Court colleagues. 'You can't fire people if they don't follow you. You can't cut their pay,' he told a group of federal judges on Saturday, the day after the court released its final opinions of the term. 'You have to be able to communicate what you think is important, and sometimes that means doing it eight different ways.' But Roberts, in fact, has several powerful levers, perhaps the most valuable being the power to assign opinions that speak for the court. When the chief is in the majority – as he was more than anyone this term – he chooses which justice will write the opinion. That's important because the force of any Supreme Court decision exceeds its bottom-line vote. Its rationale sets a precedent for future cases. Even the rhetoric and tone can influence lower court judges. For the author of an opinion, the endeavor offers a chance to steer the law and can be a point of personal pride. Completing his 20th session on America's highest court, Roberts has routinely kept the most important cases for himself, including those involving presidential powers. Still, he has wielded his assignment power strategically over the years, to influence and reward colleagues. In some situations, his assignments have appeared intended to cut against type or disprove ideological generalizations of the court. And then there was last Friday, when Roberts produced a true – and tactically intriguing – surprise. As he opened the final courtroom proceeding of the 2024-25 term, he revealed from the elevated bench that Justice Amy Coney Barrett had the opinion for the court in the most awaited case. It was the case that would effectively release President Donald Trump from dozens of lower-court orders blocking his second-term policies across the country, including his effort to roll back the current birthright citizenship given all babies born in the United States regardless of their parents' legal status. The assignment was a plum one for the junior justice on the right wing – a justice who'd been lambasted by the MAGA world (and by Trump himself) for being insufficiently loyal, despite her overwhelmingly conservative record – reinforced by the decision she was about to read from the bench. The surprise was evident among some in the staid courtroom. Justice Department lawyers, seated at tables below the mahogany bench, quietly exchanged glances, as did journalists in the press section to the justices' right. Lawyers following the case had presumed Roberts would keep the opinion for himself, as he has done for all major controversies involving Trump or at least give it to a justice more senior than Barrett. Roberts' choice immediately blunted Trump's criticism. 'I just have great respect for her,' the president said of Barrett after the decision in Trump v. Casa was issued. 'I always have. And her decision was brilliantly written today – from all accounts.' For the strategic chief, the choice of Barrett also strengthened his alliance with a pivotal justice whom liberals, for their part, have been trying to entice toward the center. Barrett and Roberts did not respond to requests for comment. Like the eight associate justices, the chief holds one vote. But he dictates much of the court's agenda, as he oversees oral arguments and runs the closed-door conferences where the justices discuss and vote on cases. By tradition, the most senior justice on the majority side of a case assigns the opinion. (The chief justice enjoys seniority over all justices, irrespective of their longer tenure.) Roberts was in the majority on this conservative dominated bench more than any justice last session, and he determined who would be the author of 54 of the 56 signed opinions handed down after briefing and oral argument. This is the Roberts Court in both the colloquial and real sense; he is rarely relegated to dissent, although two exceptions are notable: the 2015 decision declaring a right to same-sex marriage and the 2022 decision striking down all federal abortion rights. All modern chiefs, to various degrees, have employed the assignment power to influence outcomes. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who served from 1969 to 1986, was known to switch his vote to ensure he would be in the majority and control the opinion. Burger, appointed by President Richard Nixon, favored colleagues who shared his right-wing ideology, often relying on then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, for whom Roberts served as a clerk during the 1980-81 term. Rehnquist, elevated to chief justice by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, gained a reputation for being less manipulative and more even-handed. Fixated on speed and efficiency, Rehnquist also rewarded associate justices who wrote fast and avoided tangents that would cause a justice to drop off. (An author needs to hold at least five justices on the opinion for a majority.) Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who had known Rehnquist since their years together at Stanford Law School, understood Rehnquist and often finished her opinions first. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the bench in 1993, she complained to O'Connor that Rehnquist's first assignment to her was a complicated pension dispute. 'Ruth, you just do it,' O'Connor admonished, 'and get your opinion in circulation before he makes the next set of assignments.' Roberts, at the recent judicial conference, implicitly acknowledged that the current justices let draft opinions pile up. They left six major decisions to the last day. 'People have their own ideas of a schedule,' he said of other justices. 'Things were a little crunched toward the end this year. We'll try to space it out a little better next year, I suppose.' Roberts, who succeeded Rehnquist in 2005 after being appointed by President George W. Bush, assigns a batch of opinions after each two-week sitting of oral arguments and the related conference votes. The public learns of the assignments only when final decisions are announced. The chief justice has usually kept the stand-out cases, especially those involving clashes with the executive branch, perhaps to bring the weight of his stature as chief. Until last Friday, he had penned the important cases centered on Trump, such as the 2018 decision upholding his first administration's travel ban on mainly Muslim countries; the 2019 decision impeding Trump's effort to add a citizenship question to the decennial census; and the pair of 2020 controversies over Trump's effort to keep his business dealings secret as he faced government subpoenas. Last session, Roberts wrote the decision granting Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. Earlier this June, Roberts authored the decision in the controversy over state bans on certain medical care for transgender youths. His decision affirmed state restrictions on puberty blockers and hormone therapy but declined to adopt a rationale of fellow conservatives, including Barrett, that would further disadvantage bias claims brought by transgender individuals. Roberts has rewarded restraint (relatively speaking on this hard-right court) and crossover votes from ideological camps. In some situations, his assignments cut against type or dispel the notion that the dueling sides cannot come together. He assigned liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court's first African American woman and a jurist vigilant regarding anti-bias protections, the court's decision in a 'reverse discrimination' case. The court unanimously sided with a straight woman in Ohio who wanted to sue her employer after her gay boss refused to promote her. In a separate case issued on the same day, Roberts tapped liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor for a church-state clash that favored religious interests. Decided on a unanimous vote, the case reversed a Wisconsin court's ruling and opened the door for a Catholic Charities chapter to obtain an exemption from state unemployment taxes because of its religious status. The high court decision added to its series favoring religious conservatives. Roberts appears to try to distribute cases evenly among the nine. Although the politically charged disputes, in which liberals frequently find themselves in dissent, draw most of the public attention, there are plenty of low-profile, non-ideological cases to go around. Statistics on SCOTUSblog compiled by Jake Truscott and Adam Feldman show that of the total 56 opinions doled out, Barrett and fellow conservatives Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh each had seven; Roberts, Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch had six; and Jackson had five. On the left, senior Justice Sotomayor controls who writes the main dissent when liberals lose. She held onto the dissenting opinions in what many viewed as the three most significant cases and took the dramatic step of reading portions of all three from the bench. A former Notre Dame law professor, Barrett became Trump's third appointee during his first term. She was named in 2020, during the final weeks of his administration after Ginsburg's sudden death. Barrett's cautious but effective approach has given her an outsized role among the nine. Barrett sometimes casts the decisive vote or drafts the compromise rationale, as she did in an Idaho abortion controversy last year. Liberals have tried to entice her toward middle ground in other cases. During oral arguments, they often pick up on her questions as they make their own points. Roberts, too, has appeared especially attentive. When it comes to coveted decisions in high profile cases, a junior justice typically must wait years for a big opinion at this institution that prizes seniority. But in 2023, he conspicuously assigned her the decision in a major dispute over Native American rights. Barrett wrote the opinion upholding a 1978 law that prioritized the placement of Native American children with Native families or tribes in custody proceedings. Some commentators viewed the decision endorsing Native rights, on a 7-2 vote with only Thomas and Alito dissenting, as a surprising progressive turn. Gorsuch, the court's most vigorous defender of Native American rights, signed all of Barrett's opinion even as he wrote separately to further detail detail the cruel history of tribal children removed from their families and to press for greater Indian sovereignty. In more recent years, Barrett has guided compromises as the crucial fifth vote. Yet in Friday's Trump dispute, her vote was one of six and her approach was one that Roberts himself might have adopted if he'd held onto the case. The majority restricted the authority of US district court judges to impose nationwide injunctions to prevent arguably unconstitutional government policies while litigation proceeds. It was a resounding victory for Trump's legal team, although the court left open the possibility that people challenging the administration could obtain broad remedies through class action lawsuits. In her written opinion and oral summary from the bench, Barrett took a page from Justice Antonin Scalia and his 1999 decision in Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo v. Alliance Bond Fund, involving a dispute over equitable remedies between a Mexican holding company and an investment fund. Barrett was a law clerk to Scalia during that 1998-99 session as he was drafting the opinion. Adopting her mentor's originalist method, Barrett in the new case looked to early American history for an analogue to the universal injunctions judges have used to block Trump's policies and those of presidents before him. 'Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding, or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter,' she wrote, repeatedly citing Scalia's opinion. 'Thus, under the Judiciary Act (of 1789), federal courts lack authority to issue them.' And in a footnote targeting liberal dissenters' argument, she invoked a choice Scalia line: 'It is precisely because the universal injunction is a new, potent remedy that it poses new, potent risks. Our observation in Grupo Mexicano rings true here: 'Even when sitting as a court in equity, we have no authority to craft a 'nuclear weapon' of the law.'' Scalia, with his incendiary rhetoric and unyielding conservatism, sometimes had trouble holding a majority. He was not a safe bet for a difficult opinion assignment. Barrett is proving otherwise. Although some conservatives wrote separately to expound on their individual positions, all signed her opinion in full.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump's budget bill is closer to becoming law - here are the remaining sticking points
Donald Trump's massive tax and spending budget bill is returning to the US House of Representatives - as the clock ticks down to the president's 4 July deadline for lawmakers to present him with a final version that can be signed into law. The bill narrowly cleared the Senate, or upper chamber of Congress, on Tuesday. Vice-President JD Vance cast a tie-breaking vote after more than 24 hours of debate and resistance from some Republican senators. It could prove equally tricky for Trump's allies to pass the bill through the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson hopes to hold a vote as early as Wednesday. The lower chamber approved an earlier version of the bill in May with a margin of just one vote, and this bill must now be reconciled with the Senate version. Both chambers are controlled by Trump's Republicans, but within the party several factions are fighting over key policies in the lengthy legislation. Sticking points include the question of how much the bill will add to the US national deficit, and how deeply it will cut healthcare and other social programmes. During previous signs of rebellion against Trump at Congress, Republican lawmakers have ultimately fallen in line. Facing intense pressure, House must decide if Trump's bill is good enough What's in Trump's budget bill? Trump and Musk feud again over budget plans The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the version of the bill that was passed on Tuesday by the Senate could add $3.3tn (£2.4tn) to the US national deficit over the next 10 years. That compares with $2.8tn that could be added by the earlier version that was narrowly passed by the House. The deficit means the difference between what the US government spends and the revenue it receives. This outraged the fiscal hawks in the conservative House Freedom Caucus, who have threatened to tank the bill. Many of them are echoing claims made by Elon Musk, Trump's former adviser and campaign donor, who has repeatedly lashed out at lawmakers for considering a bill that will ultimately add to US national debt. Shortly after the Senate passed the bill, Congressman Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a Freedom Caucus member, called the move "unconscionable". "What the Senate did, I'll vote against it here and I'll vote against it on the floor," he added. Norman's colleague from Texas, Chip Roy, was also quick to signal his frustration. "I think the odds are a hell of a lot lower than they were even 48 hours ago or 72 hours ago based on the deal-cutting that I just saw," Roy said in response to a question about meeting Trump's 4 July deadline. Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris of Tennessee told Fox News that "a group of us are not going to vote to advance the bill until we iron out some of the deficit problems". "Mr Musk is right, we cannot sustain these deficits," Harris continued. "He understands finances, he understands debts and deficits, and we have to make further progress." On Tuesday, Conservative Congressman Andy Ogles went as far as to file an amendment that would completely replace the Senate version of the bill, which he called a "dud", with the original House-approved one. Meanwhile, Ohio Republican Warren Davison posted on X: "Promising someone else will cut spending in the future does not cut spending." He added: "We will eventually arrive at the crash site, because it appears nothing will stop this runaway spending train. A fatal overdose of government." Beyond fiscal hawks, House Republican leadership will also have to contend with moderates in their party who represent more liberal-leaning states and key swing districts that helped the party rise to power in the November election. "I've been clear from the start that I will not support a final reconciliation bill that makes harmful cuts to Medicaid, puts critical funding at risk, or threatens the stability of healthcare providers," said Congressman David Valadao, who represents a swing district in California. This echoes the criticism of opposition Democrats. Other Republicans have signalled a willingness to compromise. Randy Fine, from Florida, told the BBC he had frustrations with the Senate version of the bill, but that he would vote it through the House because "we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Representatives from poorer districts are worried about the Senate version of the bill harming their constituents, which could also hurt them at the polls in 2026. According to the Hill, six Republicans planning to vote down the bill due to concerns about cuts to key provisions, including cuts to medical coverage. Some of the critical Republicans have attacked the Senate's more aggressive cuts to Medicaid, the healthcare programme relied upon by millions of low-income Americans. House Republicans had wrestled over how much to cut Medicaid and food subsidies in the initial version their chamber passed. They needed the bill to reduce spending, in order to offset lost revenue from the tax cuts contained in the legislation. The Senate made steeper cuts to both areas in the version passed on Tuesday. Changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) in the Senate's bill would see roughly 12 million Americans lose health insurance by 2034, according to a CBO report published on Saturday. Under the version originally passed by the House, a smaller number of 11 million Americans would have had their coverage stripped, according to the CBO. Discussing the Medicaid issue with former Trump adviser and conservative podcaster Steve Bannon, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was asked whether the House might simply "rubber stamp" the Senate version. The right-wing House member and Trump loyalist responded that there was not enough support to get the bill through the House, using strong language to suggest the situation was a mess. "I think it's far from over," she said. "It's really a dire situation. We're on a time clock that's really been set on us, so we have a lot of pressure." The bill also deals with the question of how much taxpayers can deduct from the amount they pay in federal taxes, based on how much they pay in state and local taxes (Salt). This, too, has become a controversial issue. There is currently a $10,000 cap, which expires this year. Both the Senate and House have approved increasing this to $40,000. But in the Senate-approved version, the cap would return to $10,000 after five years. This change could pose a problem for some House Republicans.
