I’ve been updating NRO readers since 2011 about an extraordinary lawsuit filed against the island of Guam for blatant discrimination. The plaintiff in the case is a retired Air Force officer who was banned from registering to vote because of his race. Not only did he finally win his lawsuit after years of effort, he has just been awarded almost a million dollars in attorneys’ fees and costs. So strike up a win for the good guys.

Arnold Davis sued Guam because the territorial government had banned anyone from participating in a plebiscite on the future of the island if they were not a descendant of the Chamorro natives who originally inhabited Guam. Today they constitute about 36 percent of the population. When Davis tried to register to vote, his application was rejected and marked as “void” because he is white. Guam was also discriminating against black, Hispanic, and Asian residents of the island.

In 2009, Davis complained to the U.S. Justice Department about the racial discrimination he had suffered. It was an obvious violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, as well as Rice v. Cayetano, a 2000 Supreme Court decision that prohibited Hawaii from engaging in similar behavior.

But Attorney General Eric Holder refused to do anything about it. So Davis had to get private counsel to represent him.

Enter, J. Christian Adams of the Election Law Center and Michael Rosman at the Center for Individual Rights (CIR). They took the case and battled Guam for the past eight years.  That fight included a trip to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the law firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, led by Douglas Cox, took up Davis’s cause and helped Adams and CIR with the appeal. The Ninth Circuit overruled the initial decision of the trial judge in favor of Guam, remanded the case to the district court, where the judge finally ruled in favor of Davis in 2017 amidst incredible resistance from the politicians who run Guam. Rather than concede their discriminatory behavior, Guam has once again appealed that decision to the Ninth Circuit.

Due credit goes to the Trump administration and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for reversing the refusal of the Holder/Lynch Justice Department to fully enforce the Voting Rights Act. As I previously reported at NRO, Justice finally got involved in 2017 by filing an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit on behalf of Davis, arguing that Guam’s action “intentionally discriminates based on race.”  It also sued Guam in September 2017 for racial discrimination in its administration of a land trust that limits housing benefits and leases of land to “native Chamorros” only.

In the meantime, however, Davis’s lawyers submitted a request for payment of their attorneys’ fees and costs to the trial judge in Guam, Frances Tydingco-Gatewood. Both the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Awards Act of 1976 provide that a prevailing party can be awarded reasonable attorneys’ fees, expert fees, and other litigation expenses. Guam has demonstrated a complete refusal throughout this entire case to recognize its wrongdoing, including its resistance to paying Davis for the costs he expended to bring Guam to justice.

But on April 8, Judge Tydingco-Gatewood awarded Davis $947,717.39 in attorneys’ fees and costs. She also made some interesting observations in her 40-page order.

First of all, Guam tried to argue that it would not be reasonable for the attorneys’ fees to be based on the prevailing hourly rate for lawyers in Washington instead of the much lower rate in Guam. But the evidence showed that there were no lawyers in Guam who were willing to represent Davis in a case that was politically unacceptable to the territorial government and its allies.

Just finding local counsel who would file pleadings in the litigation for the Washington lawyers without doing any substantive work was a problem. J. Christian Adams flew to Guam and spent a week personally meeting with lawyers trying to find someone who would participate in the case. Everyone refused.

Adams had to fly to Saipan to find a member of the Guam bar willing to take the case. That lawyer was Mun Su Park. Judge Tydingco-Gatewood commended Park for his willingness to take the case despite the prevailing local headwinds.

As the judge says in her order:

This case has not been an easy one for counsel to represent.  Due to the highly political nature of the case, it was almost impossible for Plaintiff to find local counsel. This was demonstrated by Plaintiff when he and Adams contacted a total of 37 attorneys, all of whom declined representation for various reasons – some defended the plebiscite; others feared for their safety and property if they took on the case; and many were afraid that public officials and judges would view them less favorably if they were associated in preventing the plebiscite.  This court itself witnessed firsthand the emotions running high in its courtroom and outside of the courthouse . . .

In her conclusion, the judge chastises the Obama Justice Department. As she says, Davis did everything he could to convince the Justice Department in 2009 to “take action on his behalf.” Davis “was compelled to seek private representation” only “when it became clear that no action” would be taken by the Justice Department.

Tydingco-Gatewood goes out of her way to praise the lawyers who took on this politically incorrect case, saying in her award of attorneys’ fees and costs that “in this sensitive and highly political-in-nature case, Plaintiff’s billing judgment – both for attorneys’ fees and costs —  demonstrates an extra ordinary dedication to containment of cost and renews this court’s faith in conscientious billing practices.”

Guam’s elected officials and their political allies resemble segregationists of the Old South. They believe there is nothing wrong with discriminating on the basis of race in voting and housing. They have defiantly fought for years to continue these practices. Equally as shameful was the willingness of the U.S. Justice Department, during the Obama era, to countenance that misbehavior. As a result, Arnold Davis, an Air Force officer who served his country for decades, was forced to incur a million dollars in attorneys’ fees just to have the right to vote in the U.S. territory where he lives.

The next time the territorial government of Guam comes to Washington with its hands out looking for federal funds, Congress should keep that in mind.