The only district in a Texas county where Black and Latino voters can determine election outcomes is under siege — and that county’s sole Black Democratic commissioner refuses to go down without a fight.
Stephen Holmes has served since 1999, and he’s insisted that he and his constituents won’t “go quietly in the night.” Rather, they’re going to “rage, rage, rage” until they secure justice at the ballot box.
A federal appeals court has agreed to rehear a case in 2024 that could prohibit claims under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 from the kinds of minority coalitions that have defined Holmes’ Precinct 3 in Galveston County since the early 1990s.
The case springs from a clash over a 2021 redistricting plan for Galveston County’s Commissioners Court — the county’s chief governing body — that civil rights groups say is racially discriminatory because it chops up Precinct 3, the one majority-minority district, where Black and Latino residents make up 58% of the electorate.
Further complicating matters, the U.S. Supreme Court in December allowed a map that dilutes Black and Latino votes in the district to go forward while the federal appeals court revisits the case.
The dispute could supercharge the assault on the crowning legislative achievement of the Black liberation struggle, even though neither the text nor the history of the Voting Rights Act prohibits minority groups with shared political interests from being combined for vote-dilution claims.
For several decades, Precinct 3 has been something like a beacon of minority power in the Gulf Coast community. With the help of their Latino counterparts, Black voters have been able to pick the district’s county commissioner and diversify the court.
“Having a precinct where Black and Latino voters have consistently felt represented on a number of issues, from education to policing, has been paramount to ensuring equality of opportunity in the political process,” Valencia Richardson, legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit government watchdog group, told Capital B.
The Campaign Legal Center joined a lawsuit in 2021 to champion Galveston County voters in the redistricting case.
A district court judge ruled in October that the new Galveston County map likely violates the Voting Rights Act, agreeing with an expert for the NAACP plaintiffs that the plan is not simply “egregious” but also “mean-spirited.”
A three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, widely considered the most conservative appellate court in the country, affirmed the decision in November. But it also requested that the full 5th Circuit, which hears cases from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, overturn precedent — including its own precedent — permitting minority-coalition claims under Section 2, alleging that such claims are “wrong as a matter of law.”
In late November, the Fifth Circuit announced that its entire bench would take up the question next May.
“They’re basically trying to strip away our power, to take away our seat at the table,” said Lucille McGaskey, a Galveston County resident and community leader.
“It’s no coincidence”
The 5th Circuit’s move is part of a broader threat to the Voting Rights Act.
A three-judge panel from the 8th Circuit, which covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, ruled in November in an Arkansas redistricting case that private parties, including civil rights groups and individual citizens, can’t sue under Section 2, a provision that allows litigation against states using racially discriminatory voting policies.
Within weeks, Louisiana asked the full 5th Circuit to apply this decision to its own slow-going redistricting battle. The court in December denied the state’s petition.
Read more: The Case That Could Destroy the Voting Rights Act
It’s hardly an accident that Section 2 is a target, according to Richardson. In 2013, the Supreme Court defanged Section 5, which had required that states and jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination be “pre-cleared” before changing their voting and election policies.
The racial gap in voter turnout ballooned in many previously covered areas following the gutting of Section 5, New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice reported in a 2021 study.
Without this crucial backstop, private plaintiffs, who file most cases safeguarding the right to vote, have had to lean even more on Section 2, among other pathways, to strike back against restrictive voting measures and racially discriminatory maps.
In response, conservative forces have been going to the wall to turn the Voting Rights Act into a dead letter. This has been particularly true since June, when the high court ordered an obstinate Alabama to create a second majority-Black congressional district.
“This is the first redistricting cycle [since the Shelby County v. Holder ruling in 2013 that eviscerated Section 5] where states and jurisdictions haven’t had to show that election and voting changes wouldn’t result in racial discrimination,” Richardson explained. “It’s no coincidence that we’re seeing all these challenges under Section 2 in places such as Galveston County, Louisiana, and Alabama, given the lack of federal oversight post-Shelby County, as well as the lack of accountability to voters of color.”
With these schemes to limit the franchise in full swing, legal experts underscore the urgency of including an explicit right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, or at least restoring the protections of the Voting Rights Act.
“It’s important to realize that [bad actors] aren’t merely chipping away at the Voting Rights Act as a concept,” Richardson said. “They’re chipping away at what I think is one of the most effective pieces of legislation ever passed — legislation that turned the U.S. into a true multiracial democracy.”