New federal court lawsuit arguing a violation of one-person-one-vote in the context of city council elections. Apart from the merits of this particular case, I’ve been wondering whether the current originalist-textualist U.S. Supreme Court would have any appetite to jettison, or significantly curtail, the thoroughly nonoriginalist (let’s all admit it) Reapportionment Revolution wrought by Reynolds v. Sims and its progeny. Evenwel from a few years ago now (2016) was a significant signal in this direction, in the separate opinions from Justices Alito and Thomas. But that was before the Court became transformed by the arrival of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Of course, undoing the Reapportionment Revolution would be a hugely heavy lift in terms of jettisoning longstanding precedent, and the motivation for doing so in this context is non the same (let’s also acknowledge) as the motivation for overruling Roe in Dobbs. Still, a thorough-going revision of constitutional jurisprudence on textualists-originalist lines (of the kind that Thomas advocates) would require overruling Reynolds v. Sims and its progeny root-and-branch. At the very least, any new lawsuit predicated on those precedents must recognize the potential vulnerability–and uncertainty–on this point.

(Interestingly, and somewhat confusingly, the complaint in this new case mentions the Voting Rights Act as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but does not present a separate count alleging a VRA violation; and the website summary of the suit mentions only the constitutional claim based on a violation of “equally populated” districts.)