Linda Greenhouse on #SCOTUS Term, and Evenwel in the Next

NYT:

Last month, the court accepted another case without a split among the lower courts. Evenwel v. Abbott challenges the inclusion of noncitizens among those who are to be counted for the purpose of redistricting. The case reflects a cynical effort to maximize the voting power of Anglo Republicans in Texas, propelled to the court’s docket by the same legal team that brought us the Fisher case as well as Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case that gutted the Voting Rights Act.

The theory behind the new case is that when noncitizens count – as they do everywhere in the country — in the population that must be spread evenly among electoral districts, the votes of citizens (presumably Latinos) in districts with large numbers of noncitizens are overweighted. The argument is that this violates the rule of one-person, one-vote, because it acts to underweight the votes of those in districts that have few immigrants. and therefore more citizen-voters.

The issue seemed to pop up out of nowhere, but actually it’s one that never went away. In 2001, the court refused to hear a similar challenge to the counting of noncitizens. Justice Thomas dissented in that case, Chen v. City of Houston. “We have never determined the relevant ‘population’ that states and localities must equally distribute among their districts,” he wrote, adding that “as long as we sustain the one-person, one-vote principle, we have an obligation to explain to states and localities what it actually means.”

It took 14 years, but now the issue is back, in what looms so far as the dominant case of the court’s next term. But that’s next year’s stretch run.

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