Federal Appellate Court: 14th Amendment Doesn't Mean Chicago Must Have An Elected School Board

Capitol Fax reports what a federal appeals court has said about the 14th Amendment and local school boards :

In this suit under §2 of the Voting Rights Act, 52 U.S.C. §10301, plaintiffs (registered voters, some of whom are parents or grandparents of school-age children) contend that this system deprives black and Latino citizens of their right to vote. School boards elsewhere in Illinois are elected; plaintiffs say that failure to elect the school board in Chicago has a disproportionate effect on minority voters. The district court dismissed the complaint. […]

The Voting Rights Act has been on the books for 53 years, and as far as we are aware no court has understood §2 to re- quire that any office be filled by election. Several courts have rejected contentions to that effect. […]

There is a further problem with plaintiffs’ position. Black and Latino citizens do not vote for the school board in Chicago, but neither does anyone else. Every member of the electorate is treated identically […]

Plaintiffs have a second theory: that allowing the Mayor to appoint the Board’s members violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. […]

This equal-protection theory is brought up short by Sail- ors v. Board of Education, 387 U.S. 105 (1967), which holds that appointing a school board is constitutionally permissible, and by Hearne v. Board of Education, 185 F.3d 770 (7th Cir. 1999), which holds that the 1995 Illinois statute is valid not- withstanding the line it draws between Chicago and every other city in Illinois.

Sometimes sanity does prevail in the federal courts...