Via Steve Vladeck comes this Supreme Court order, over the dissents of Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas, of the Eighth Circuit case raising the question whether private plaintiffs have the right to sue under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act:
The stay is in some ways not a surprise, since the argument that Section 2 can only be enforced by the Department of Justice is laughable. More than 90 percent of Section 2 cases have been brought through private enforcement. Congress knew this full well when it tweaked Section 2 in renewing the Voting Rights Act in 2006 and did nothing to touch private enforcement.
Justice Kavanaugh had already put enforcement of the ridiculous 8th Circuit has on hold, in part because there was a loony North Dakota Legislative Council argument that the current holder of a seat in the state legislature, elected from a Native-majority district, would be immediately ousted by the issuance of the mandate from the Eighth Circuit.
Now everything stays on hold pending a likely decision by the Supreme Court in the next few months to hear this case on the merits, and opponents of the VRA will have to try to pick off two of three additional conservative Justices (Kavanaugh, Barrett, and CJ Roberts) to go along with this unsupported evisceration of the remaining key part of the VRA (after the conservative Justices killed off the other part in the 2013 Shelby County decision).
