The Supreme Court on July 24 paused a lower court ruling that prevents voters in seven states from suing over alleged discrimination under the federal Voting Rights Act.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit previously issued an order barring voters in the seven states it covers from filing the lawsuits. The states within the circuit’s geographical boundaries are North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nebraska.
The emergency unsigned order was granted in a case known as Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe. The court did not provide reasons for its new ruling.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh had previously, on July 16, temporarily put the Eighth Circuit’s ruling on hold.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the new order but did not explain why.
The applicants who sought the order from the Supreme Court are the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Spirit Lake Tribe, and three Native American voters. The respondent is Michael Howe, North Dakota’s secretary of state.
The tribes are expected to file a petition with the Supreme Court in the near future seeking formal review of the Eighth Circuit’s decision.
The Indian tribes had argued in their lawsuit that an electoral map the North Dakota Legislature approved in 2021 violated the nondiscrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 of the statute prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a large language minority group.
They filed what’s called a private enforcement lawsuit against the secretary of state to enforce Section 2. They brought their legal action under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, a federal law that allows individuals to sue the government for civil rights violations.
The tribes argued that the Legislature placed electoral district boundary lines for state-level elections in a way that illegally diluted the voting strength of Native Americans.
A federal district court sided with the tribes in January 2024 and adopted a map they proposed that was used in elections that year.
In May, the Eighth Circuit ruled that the tribes had no right to sue under Section 1983 to privately enforce Section 2 and ordered that the 2021 map be reinstated.
Kavanaugh’s July 16 order froze the Eighth Circuit’s judgment and temporarily reinstated the lower court-ordered 2024 map. The full Supreme Court’s new order also keeps the 2024 map in place for the time being.
Howe said in a July 22 brief that the applicants’ arguments fell short of what is required for the Supreme Court to permanently block the Eighth Circuit’s ruling.
The applicants hope that blocking the ruling “would have the extraordinary effect of requiring North Dakota to hold two consecutive elections using a court-imposed map that the Eighth Circuit … determined should never have been imposed to begin with,” the brief reads.
Several courts “have uncritically assumed” that private plaintiffs may sue over vote-dilution claims, but “assumptions” are not court rulings, Howe said.
“And the fact that Section 2’s private enforceability was not previously challenged does not mean Congress spoke with the clarity needed to create a privately enforceable right,” he said.
In fact, the Eighth Circuit has issued two “deliberately and thoroughly reasoned” opinions on that legal issue, Howe said.
Instead of halting the circuit court ruling, Howe said, the Supreme Court should allow the Eighth Circuit decision to take effect before granting review. Reviewing the case would give the high court “the opportunity to fully consider the merits of the Circuit Court’s rigorous analysis.”
The tribes said in their July 15 application to the Supreme Court that North Dakota “reduced from three to one the number of legislative seats in which Native American voters in northeastern North Dakota could elect representatives of their choice.”
They said that the Eighth Circuit’s ruling and other courts’ similar rulings “knee-cap Congress’s most important civil rights statute” and are “especially harmful to Native Americans.”
“North Dakota—like many states—has a long and sad history of official discrimination against Native Americans that persists to this day,” their application reads.
The Eighth Circuit’s decision means that it is “the only Circuit in which private plaintiffs cannot enforce Section 2,” the application said.
Meanwhile, in its new term that begins in October, the Supreme Court will hear two cases about whether a Louisiana election map that includes two black-majority congressional districts discriminates against non-black voters.
The court heard oral arguments in the cases in March but on June 27 declined to issue a ruling. Instead, the court ordered that the cases be reargued. The court has not yet scheduled the reargument. The cases, which were heard together, are Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais.
Thomas dissented from the ruling, saying the high court was required to resolve constitutional challenges over congressional redistricting “promptly.”
“That resolution is particularly critical here, as these cases highlight the intractable conflict between this Court’s interpretation of [Section] 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 … and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,” he wrote.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 24, 2025, in The Epoch Times.