Amy Howe has this report on yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court oral argument in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, No. 18-281.
The substantive issue in the case has to do with gerrymandering. CJLF takes no position on this issue, as it is outside of our interest area.
The issue that got most of the argument is the House of Delegates' legal standing to appeal after the Virginia Attorney General declined to do so. On this point CJLF is very interested and filed a "friend of the court" brief. Narrow views of standing have been used to block victims of crime from seeking redress when executive officers are derelict in their duty, and we have faced that issue in several cases when representing victims.
It looks like we might get a 6-3 on standing. Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan were skeptical of the House's standing, but Justice Breyer raised a point very similar to the concerns expressed in our brief. From Amy's report:
Justice Stephen Breyer was concerned that, if the House of Delegates were not allowed to appeal in a case like this one, partisan divisions in government might lead to inertia in redistricting challenges. Here, for example, the Republican-controlled legislature drew the challenged map, but the state's Democratic attorney general decided not to appeal the district court's decision striking it down. If you have a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor, or vice versa, Breyer posited, "nobody's going to be able to attack it." "It's the House's plan," Breyer emphasized, and the governor won't attack it "because he likes it politically."
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