Supreme Court revives ethnic discrimination

Contrarian -   Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. finally got what he wanted. He has been working toward this moment since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department arguing that the Voting Rights Act that ended Jim Crow was a mistake. On Wednesday, after decades of methodical court-packing and chipping away at civil rights law, he finally got there. The 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that for four decades gave Black voters a legal pathway to challenge districts drawn to silence them.

Justice Samuel A. Alito’s majority opinion left the statute on the books. But plaintiffs must now prove intentional discrimination rather than discriminatory results, a standard Congress explicitly rejected in 1982 precisely because discriminatory intent is so easy to hide behind a smile and a process memo. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, the majority has eviscerated the law. The words remain. The enforcement is gone.

This distinction matters more than it might appear. Under Section 2 as Congress wrote it, you could win a voting rights case by showing that a map consistently kept Black voters from electing anyone who represented them. You didn’t have to prove anyone sat in a room and said the quiet part out loud. Callais now requires proof that someone meant to discriminate. And conveniently, states can now claim they were just doing partisan gerrymandering, which the federal courts cannot touch, thanks to a 2019 ruling. So racial gerrymandering is now effectively legal as long as you label it something else. Kagan called this out directly. The majority, she wrote, had the nerve to rule that the Voting Rights Act must be weakened to protect partisan gerrymanders.

Republicans in Georgia were calling for new maps within hours. Florida, already in a special session, got the green light to go further. Analysts estimate this could cost Black members of Congress up to 15 seats.

MS NOW --  After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment banned slavery (mostly). The 14th Amendment granted birthright citizenship (for now). And the 15th Amendment barred the federal government and the states from denying the right to vote based on race, color and servitude (in theory). But until the fairly recent year of 1965, the 15th Amendment was routinely ignored by Southern states using the legal mechanism of Jim Crow.

Poll taxes, literacy tests and language restrictions were the most visible tools of voter suppression. However, Black voters who successfully navigated those hurdles still faced the ignominy of not having a real choice. Hostile political regimes drew the boundaries of voting lines and districts to make it impossible for Black and brown voters to elect anyone who represented their interests. Enter the Voting Rights Act.

Section 2 of that act made it illegal to design districts to dilute or block racial communities from finding common cause. It also required a corrective action: When populations routinely boxed out of meaningful participation hit a certain threshold, political districts should reflect their growing power. Thus, political leaders couldn’t use maps as weapons to permanently silence the voices of people of color.

The Guardian -   Southern states are scrambling to redraw congressional districts in response to the supreme court’s Wednesday ruling that severely weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act, which protected against racial discrimination in drawing voting maps.

Before the supreme court’s decision, some states had already begun initiating processes to redraw districts and gut Black voting power. More states have now followed, with governors calling for special sessions to redraw congressional districts, potentially before the midterm elections in November.

Voting districts are typically redrawn once a decade, after the census. Last year, Donald Trump triggered a round of mid-decade redistricting after he urged Texas Republicans to give a boost to the Republican party during the midterm elections. California Democrats responded in turn. From there, multiple other states began pushing redistricting, along with those whose maps were already tied up in state and federal courts.

Now, state legislatures have a new opportunity, and several southern states have already acted or indicated they will do so soon.

While it’s unclear how many states will be able to redraw their maps before the November midterm elections given that filing deadlines and in some cases primaries have passed in many states, Republicans are expected to take extreme measures to move quickly.