A Remand Is Not a Map

The Supreme Court opened its new term on Monday with an order list that runs to 42 pages. Near the top, under the heading “summary dispositions”, were two cases from Washington’s Yakima Valley. In each, the justices granted the petition, vacated the Ninth Circuit’s judgment and sent the case back “for further consideration in light of Louisiana v. Callais”, the April decision that changed how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act applies to district lines.

The order is two sentences long and decides nothing about the merits. That is what this kind of order is for. In Lawrence v. Chater in 1996 the Court said that granting, vacating and remanding is “potentially appropriate” where intervening developments “reveal a reasonable probability that the decision below rests upon a premise that the lower court would reject if given the opportunity for further consideration”. Washington asked for exactly that. What the order does not do is change the legislative district that Yakima Valley voters are electing representatives in this year.

The district and the lawsuit

The dispute is over Legislative District 15, which Washington’s bipartisan redistricting commission drew in 2021 and the legislature adopted in February 2022. In January 2022 a group of Latino voters led by Susan Soto Palmer sued, alleging that the district diluted Hispanic voting strength in violation of Section 2. After a bench trial, Judge Robert Lasnik of the Western District of Washington held in August 2023 that it did, and in March 2024 he adopted a remedial map in which the old LD 15 was reconfigured and renumbered LD 14.

The State did not appeal. Its own expert, John Alford, had concluded that the three preconditions for a Section 2 claim set out in Thornburg v. Gingles appeared to be met, and the State told the court before trial that it could no longer dispute them. The appeal came from two men allowed to intervene in the case: Jose Trevino, a voter moved into the new district, and Alex Ybarra, a state representative from the neighbouring 13th district.

In August 2025 the Ninth Circuit affirmed unanimously. It held that neither intervenor had standing to challenge the finding that LD 15 broke the law, and that Trevino, who did have standing to challenge the remedial map as a racial gerrymander, had not shown that race predominated in drawing it. A separate suit by Benancio Garcia, who had argued that the commission’s LD 15 was itself a racial gerrymander, had been dismissed as moot once the district was replaced, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed that too. Monday’s order covers both cases, Trevino v. Hobbs and Garcia v. Hobbs.

What Callais changed

Callais was decided on 29 April, six to three, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. It held that Louisiana’s congressional map, drawn with an additional majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, because the Voting Rights Act had not required that district. As the syllabus summarises the holding, Section 2 “imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

Lasnik’s ruling was not of that kind. He found that LD 15 violated Section 2’s prohibition on discriminatory results, applying the Gingles framework as the Court had reaffirmed it in Allen v. Milligan in 2023. In its brief to the justices on 2 June, Washington said the lower courts “correctly applied the law in this case as it existed at the time”, but that Callais had “substantially changed the relevant standards”, and that the lower courts should have the first opportunity to apply it. It asked the Court to grant, vacate and remand.

The other two sides each wanted something else. The Latino voters asked the Court to deny review outright, arguing that the intervenors lacked standing to appeal and that “the decision below remains correct following Callais.” The intervenors wanted more than a remand. Callais, they wrote in reply, “warrants more than a GVR”, because it exposed what they called the Ninth Circuit’s errors on standing and strict scrutiny. The Court gave Washington what it asked for.

Too late for this year

The intervenors had tried to get the question decided before this year’s elections. On 4 May they asked Lasnik to reopen his judgment in light of Callais. He refused on 15 May, holding, as their lawyers told the Supreme Court, that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling on standing bound him. The same day they asked the justices to expedite their petition, pointing to an Alabama case, Allen v. Caster, in which the Court had done so. Washington opposed. “Under Washington law, the Purcell principle, and practical constraints,” its lawyers wrote, “it is already too late to redraw Washington’s state legislative districts for the 2026 election.” The Court denied the motion on 26 May. On 17 June the petitions were distributed for the conference of 28 September, and Monday’s order followed it.

Washington’s ballot law shows why the calendar matters. Under RCW 29A.40.070, county auditors must mail ballots to service and overseas voters at least 45 days before a general election, and to everyone else at least 18 days before. For the general election on 3 November, the first of those deadlines was 19 September, before the justices met. The second is 16 October.

What the remand reaches

The order vacates the Ninth Circuit’s judgments. It does not vacate Lasnik’s, and it says nothing about the injunction that put the remedial map in place and that, in the words the intervenors quoted from it, orders the Secretary of State to “conduct future elections” under that map. What goes back to the Ninth Circuit are the questions it decided: whether the intervenors could appeal the liability finding at all, whether the remedial map was drawn by race, and whether Garcia’s challenge is moot. Callais was about the meaning of Section 2 and about when a state may use race to comply with it. The panel now has to say whether that changes any of its answers.

The parties are already on record about where it leads. Washington told the justices in May that Callais “creates issues that will surely lead to litigation about what map Washington should use in subsequent elections”, and that none of them was for the Supreme Court to resolve in the first instance. The intervenors told Lasnik that the right result was to set aside the remedial map and reinstate the one the commission adopted. The Latino voters, in their brief opposing review, called that position contradictory: the intervenors joined the case to defend LD 15’s boundaries, they wrote, and now argue it was illegal all along.

The parties do not even agree on the district’s starting point. By the intervenors’ count, the court’s remedy lowered the Hispanic share of the district’s citizen voting-age population from 52.6 per cent to 50.2. Washington put the commission’s district at about 51.5 per cent. The Latino voters put it at 50.02 per cent, a bare majority that they said had been drawn so that it “would no longer elect Latino-preferred candidates”.

The same order list sent five other cases back for reconsideration in light of decisions from the term just ended, among them the government’s appeal in litigation over temporary protected status. None came with a word of explanation, which is how such orders usually come. For Washington, the practical result is a sequence: a Ninth Circuit panel that must reread its own opinion, a district judge whose injunction is untouched, and an election in 29 days that the State said in May it was already too late to redraw for.

Sources

The order list of 5 October 2026 and the dockets in Nos. 25-901 and 25-918, with the petitions, Washington’s brief of 2 June, the Soto Palmer respondents’ brief in opposition, the intervenors’ reply, their motion to expedite of 15 May, Washington’s response of 22 May and the intervenors’ letter of 17 May reporting the district court’s Rule 60(b) ruling, were read on supremecourt.gov. Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. 85, was read in the preliminary print; the quoted holding is from its syllabus, which is not part of the opinion. Lawrence v. Chater is quoted from the Legal Information Institute and RCW 29A.40.070 from the Washington Legislature’s site. The district court’s opinions, its 15 May order and the Ninth Circuit’s opinion were not read directly; their holdings are given as the parties describe them. The population figures are each side’s own. We found no news coverage of the order when this piece was written.