Recognizing that its new decision would not just get appealed to the Supreme Court but that it upended decades of the appeal court’s own precedent, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that diverse groups could not join together to challenge election rules that dilute minorities’ voting rights, NBC News reports.
In an 11-6 ruling, with one Republican appointee joining all five Democratic judges in dissent, the Republicans stated that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t provide for groups to band together to push for reform; instead, each class of voters must make their cases individually.
“Nowhere does Section 2 indicate that two minority groups may combine forces to pursue a vote dilution claim,” Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote. “On the contrary, the statute identifies the subject of a vote dilution claim as ‘a class,’ in the singular, not the plural.”