Recent rulings by the majority of Supreme Court Justices – all but one of whom were appointed by a President who lost the popular vote – have made the Voting Rights Act essentially useless. These developments are not surprising given the ideological priorities of the Supreme Court majority, which is led by the Chief Justice who has worked for decades to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. At a time when the Republican Party and its electoral candidates face widespread and escalating criticism for the current Federal regime’s policies and actions, recent rulings by the Supreme Court majority have enabled Republican officials in multiple States to change voting districts in the midst of election primaries to favor preferred electoral candidates – reducing people of color’s representation in Congress in the process. In this context, it warrants emphasizing that the Voting Rights Act was one of the most significant civil rights and civil liberties laws, and Congress adopted it to remedy many decades of race discrimination across the country and to prevent such discrimination in the future.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court majority ruled that action under the Voting Rights Act, which created a second majority Black voting district in Louisiana as a remedy for race discrimination in voting rights, was itself somehow illegally discriminatory. In response to Callais, the Governor of Louisiana alleged that the State now faces a supposed emergency and stopped the ongoing primary election process in its tracks so the voting districts can be redrawn. Tellingly, no Louisiana Governor ever previously suspended an election process because of an emergency – even during the COVID-19 global pandemic that forced a national shutdown and killed many millions of people. More to the point, Louisiana is using the purported emergency to impose new voting districts so that there may cease to be any majority Black districts in a State with a large Black population.
Relatedly, in Allen v. Caster, the Supreme Court majority reversed the order by the lower court that Alabama must use voting districts drawn to remedy race discrimination in voting rights. Specifically, the Supreme Court majority ruled in Allen that Alabama can eliminate at least one of only two majority Black voting districts in the State that also has a large Black population. The opinion in Allen is especially shocking because, only three years ago, the Supreme Court previously determined that Alabama’s voting district map was racially discriminatory. Given the ideological motivations of the Supreme Court majority, however, the outcome in Allen unfortunately is not surprising.
In both Callais and Allen, the Supreme Court majority rationalized its judicial activism by declaring that the law only prohibits explicitly and intentionally racist gerrymandering of voting districts – a nearly impossible evidentiary hurdle to overcome as a practical matter. Given the racially driven gerrymandering now happening in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and other States that formed the Southern Confederacy, people of all racial identities committed to basic fairness and the rule of law are organizing and mobilizing on a broad-based scale to defend democracy.
