Carrie Levine for VoteBeat:

The Campaign Legal Center’s Mark Gaber had just wrapped up a trial over redistricting in Washington state, representing plaintiffs who argued that newly redrawn political maps diluted the strength of Hispanic voters, on June 7. There was not much time for catching his breath before he had to help argue a similar redistricting case the following week, in North Dakota.

Gaber woke up the next morning to a phone exploding with text messages. The Supreme Court had released an eagerly awaited decision, in Allen v. Milligan. The case had the potential to radically change the legal standards used in redistricting cases like the one he’d just argued. 

The upshot: A majority of justices had essentially defied the expectations of pundits and upheld the status quo, preserving the Voting Rights Act and leaving decades-old standards for establishing racially discriminatory effects in place.

“Am I actually awake?” Gaber recalls asking himself. The decision couldn’t have been more important to his work. As it turns out, Gaber would help argue both the last redistricting case before Milligan and the first one after it. He was also part of a team of lawyers representing Native American plaintiffs challenging legislative boundaries in North Dakota. If the Supreme Court had decided Milligan differently, it could have upended both cases. 

As it was, the pending opinion had cast a long shadow — the latest court case that had the potential to radically reshape the reach of the Voting Rights Act. He and his colleagues had crafted trial strategies based on the existing standards, wondering all along whether the Supreme Court was about to radically change them. 

“No one really knew what the court was going to do, so we obviously weren’t going to take any super affirmative steps toward a guess,” said Michael Carter, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. Carter, along with Gaber, is part of the team representing the Spirit Lake Tribe and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, tribes suing over the North Dakota maps. 

Gaber said he and his fellow lawyers had thought about whether they should wait for the Supreme Court’s opinion before proceeding. No one knew exactly when the Supreme Court would release its opinion. 

In Washington state, Gaber was part of a team of lawyers arguing the state’s redistricting commission spread Latino voters across multiple legislative districts in the Yakima Valley, preventing them from being able to elect candidates of their choice. In North Dakota, the tribes also alleged that state legislative districts were drawn in a way that reduced their ability to elect candidates of their choice, pointing to the fact that in the wake of elections held under the new maps, the state Senate for the first time since 1991 had no member who was also an enrolled member of a tribe located within the boundaries of the state. …