“Doubts about new redistricting case”

Lyle Denniston for SCOTUSBlog:

The Supreme Court on Monday afternoon told lawyers involved in a new case on the constitutionality of a congressional election district in Virginia to file new briefs on whether the case can go forward in the Court.  In a one-paragraph order issued along with two other procedural orders after the first Conference in advance of the new Term, the Court questioned whether current and former members of the House had a legal right to pursue their appeal.  The Court has not yet agreed to hear the case, but it is in a form that would require the Court to act on it if it were properly filed…..

When the voters who had filed the original lawsuit challenging District 3 answered the new appeal in the Supreme Court, they argued that the present and former lawmakers could not show that they had been injured by the new District 3 and therefore lacked “standing” to pursue their appeal under the Constitution’s Article III.

The situation appears to parallel what the Supreme Court confronted two years ago in a California case involving the same-sex marriage issue.  After a federal judge had struck down California’s “Proposition 8” ban on such marriages, and that ruling had been upheld by a federal appeals court, Proposition 8’s sponsors — who had intervened in the case — took it to the Supreme Court.  The state did not pursue an appeal on its own.  The Court in that case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, ruled that the sponsors of the ban did not have standing to appeal when state officials had failed to do so.

 

 

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