CASE SUMMARY

After Virginia redrew its legislative districts following the 2010 census, a group of registered Virginia voters sued two state agencies and four election officials (the "State Defendants") alleging that the redrawn districts were racially gerrymandered in violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Both the Virginia House of Delegates and the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates intervened as Defendants (the "House Defendants") to defend the constitutionality of the districts and participated in the case's first bench trial, the appeal of the trial court's initial decision, and the second bench trial after the case had been remanded by the Supreme Court in Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections (2017). After the second bench trial, a three-judge District Court held that eleven of the districts were unconstitutionally drawn, enjoined Virginia from conducting elections for those districts before adopting a new plan, and gave the General Assembly several months to adopt such plan. Although Virginia's Attorney General, representing the State Defendants, announced that the State would not pursue an appeal of the District Court's decision, the House Defendants did appeal that decision on their own to the U.S. Supreme Court. The issues on appeal centered around whether the House Defendants' had sufficient standing to appeal the lower court's decision on their own right when the State had declined to do so, with the House Defendants asserting two possible theories of standing: one based upon representing the interests of the State, and the other based upon representing the interests of the Virginia House of Delegates itself. Notably, after reaching the Supreme Court, the State Defendants filed a motion to dismiss the House Defendants' appeal based upon a lack of standing.

In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the House Defendants, finding that they lacked standing to appeal the lower court's invalidation of the redistricting plan on their own. The majority opinion first rejected the theory of standing based upon the asserted representation of the state's interests, explaining that Virginia law vests the state's Attorney General with the sole authority to represent the state's interests in civil litigation and at no point did the Attorney General authorize the House of Delegates to represent the state's interests here. Turning to the theory of standing based upon the interests of the House of Delegates itself, the Court stated that at no point has it held that the judicial invalidation of a state's law on constitutional grounds inflicts a judicially cognizable injury upon every governmental body involved in its passing. The majority went on to emphasize that in previous cases where a state's legislature was found to have standing to pursue an appeal on their own right, both chambers of the state's bicameral legislature were acting in unison so as to represent the legislature's interests as a whole. Here, as the sole chamber pursuing the appeal, the House Defendants cannot assert to be representing the interests of the Virginia legislature as a whole. Furthermore, the inevitable effects that the invalidation of a redistricting plan will have on the elections and composition of a state's legislature is not a sufficient injury for the purposes of standing.

Significance: (1) One chamber of a bicameral state legislature does not have standing to appeal the invalidation of a redistricting plan on its own when the State of which it is a part has declined to do so; (2) The invalidation of a state's legislatively enacted redistricting plan does not constitute a judicially cognizable injury upon the state's legislature which enacted it.

CASE LIBRARY

U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Richmond Division - 3:14-cv-00852

U.S. Supreme Court - Nos. 18-281; 18A629 [139 S.Ct. 1945]

Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill (2019)
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