SCOTUS v. Voting Rights

“Today the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, which together challenge a federal court decision outlawing a racial gerrymander in the state of Louisiana. At stake is Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which declares: “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

About a third of the people who live in Louisiana are Black, and when Republicans in the Louisiana state legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts after the 2020 census, they gerrymandered through “packing” and “cracking.” They packed as many Black voters as they could into one district and then cracked the rest across five others. This meant that out of the state’s six districts, only one is majority Black. Because voting patterns map onto racial patterns in Louisiana, this means that Black voters cannot elect representatives of their choice. As Madiba K. Dennie of Talking Points Memo notes, Louisiana has never had a Black senator, and no congressional district other than the majority-Black district has elected a Black representative. The state hasn’t had a Black governor since Reconstruction.

So Black voters sued over the new map, and federal courts agreed that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. They told the legislature to draw new maps that created a second majority-Black district. To stop that change, a group of people who described themselves as “non–African American voters” sued, saying that drawing a map to create a majority-Black district is itself an illegal racial gerrymander.

In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld the principle that if a state has used race to determine districts, it must show that it has a compelling reason to do so. In 2017 it said: “This Court has long assumed that one compelling interest is compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” In the past, the court saw that interest as served by guaranteeing the creation of majority-minority districts to guarantee that Black, Brown, and Asian-American voters can elect the lawmakers they prefer.

In today’s hearings, the right-wing majority indicated it opposes the use of race in redistricting, suggesting the previous understanding of this issue is unconstitutional. Overturning the decision of the lower court would finish the gutting of the Voting Rights Act the Roberts Court began with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.

This shift shows the willingness of the right-wing majority on the court to gather the power of the U.S. government into its own hands.

The actual name of what we know as the Voting Rights Act is “AN ACT To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.” Congress passed it after more than 80 years in which state legislatures refused to acknowledge the Fifteenth Amendment, which reads:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

When it passed the Voting Rights Act, Congress did what the Fifteenth Amendment required it to do to protect the right of racial minorities to vote. As political scientist Jonathan Ladd notes, now, though, the Supreme Court is on the cusp of saying that it, rather than Congress, can determine how to enforce the right of citizens to vote.

That the Supreme Court appears to be taking aim at a constitutional amendment added to the Constitution during Reconstruction is a little too on-the-nose. When the federal government stopped enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, former Confederates took control of their states and instituted a one-party region that lasted until the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Today, Nate Cohn of the New York Times explained that striking down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act could eliminate more than a dozen districts in the South currently held by Democrats. Republicans could win virtually uncontested control of the South and so could control the House of Representatives even if they lost the popular vote by a significant margin. Cohn writes that Democrats would need to win the popular vote by between five to six points in order to win the House if the court strikes down Section 2.

But, since gerrymandering depresses turnout of the losing party’s voters, Republicans would appear to hold the country even more firmly, making the United States as a whole reflect the American South from about 1874 to 1965.

Such a one-party state would give the leader of that party whatever power party officials permitted. We are already seeing what that could look like.”

Amendment XV

Section 1.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2.

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.