Supreme Court’s Voting Rights ruling
The court "further weakened" the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law intended to protect minority voters, says longtime reporter on the court Lawrence Hurley of NBC News.
The ruling "hollowed out" the landmark Civil Rights-era law that's increased minority representation in Congress and elsewhere, opening the door for more redistricting across the country that could aid Republican efforts to control the House, says The Associated Press.
The ruling was 6-3 along ideological lines. While the conservative majority said the opinion was a limited ruling that preserved a central tenet of the Voting Rights Act, the court’s liberal wing said the justices had taken the final step to dismantle the law, reports The New York Times.
The ruling quickly prompted some Republicans to call for redistricting in other states — even before this year’s midterm elections, says Roll Call. In fact, Louisiana has suspended its congressional primaries as a result of the ruling.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion, in which he was joined by the rest of the court’s conservative bloc, resets the test in which to determine if minority voters are being discriminated against, says Politico.
It isn't enough to demonstrate discriminatory results, as was broadly the case previously; there must be evidence of discriminatory intent, or “a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote.
Some scholars say that’s going to be a very difficult bar to get over.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the minority, "The Voting Rights Act is — or, now more accurately, was — ‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’”
"I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”
You can read the full opinions of the justices here.
Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, says, “The Supreme Court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy. This ruling is a major setback for our nation and threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled and died for.”
Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, writes in Slate that the decision is “the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy.”
In 2015, Politico Magazine published this article, titled "Inside John Roberts’ decades-long crusade against the Voting Rights Act.”
This Washington Monthly article explores Roberts’ background, referring to the 2019 biography "The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts,” by longtime reporter on the court Joan Biskupic.
"Biskupic is unfailingly evenhanded, but what she describes is a calculated, sustained assault on the nation’s civil rights laws by the most powerful judge in the country, one who stubbornly refuses to see the devastating impact of his decisions on the people most affected by them,” says the Washington Monthly.
The American Civil Liberties Union and others have an online event from 8-9 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, where legal experts and civil rights community leaders from the No Kings Coalition will discuss the ruling.
You can sign up here.
May Day ‘no work, no school, no shopping’ events
I won’t be publishing on Friday in order to participate in May Day events.
Here are some links to May Day activities:
National Education Association
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