Justice John Roberts has been agitating against the Voting Rights Act since the 1980s. He finally got ‘er done. As expected:
The Supreme Court dealt the landmark Voting Rights Act a significant blow on Wednesday in a 6-3 ruling that leaves the historic law “all but a dead letter,” according to Justice Elena Kagan.
In invalidating a Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana as an illegal racial gerrymander, the decision in Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the court’s other five conservatives, states that plaintiffs must now show that “intentional discrimination” led to the decision to not draw a minority legislative district. This makes it effectively impossible for a Voting Rights Act challenge to win in court without a clear showing of racial animus and will nullify the law’s impact.
“When [Section 2] of the Act is properly interpreted, it imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” Alito wrote for the majority. “Properly understood, [Section 2] thus does not intrude on States’ prerogative to draw districts based on nonracial factors, including to achieve partisan advantage.”
This decision is just the latest in an escalating series of judicial attacks on the historic civil rights law. But it marks “the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by the court’s other two liberal justices.
The immediate impact is not known, but it may lead some states to challenge Black and Latino majority districts as illegal racial gerrymanders, potentially reducing their representation in legislative seats from Congress all the way down to county commissions. With the Voting Rights Act now left nearly useless, Black and Latino plaintiffs will not be able to challenge the demolition of their political representation. And since Black and Latino voters have historically preferred to elect Democrats, this is likely to also have the effect of further tilting the House toward Republicans.
Lyndon Johnson famously said that the Democrats had lost the South for a generation when he signed the Civil Rights Act. I think they may have just lost it again, at least in the House for many more to come. And Black Americans in those states will lose the representation they’ve had for the past 60 years unless they agree to vote for opportunistic Black Republicans like Byron Donalds. Jim Crow redux.
This may have the most far-reaching effects of anything the Court has done. It’s very hard to see how Democrats can ever win majorities, within the individual states or nationally, with the GOP domination of the South now permanently entrenched.
If you thought the GOP wasn’t so bad before Trump, this perfectly illustrates why that isn’t so. They’ve been trying to do this for decades.