The Roberts Court finally achieved its years-long goal of killing the Voting Rights Act Wednesday, publishing a ruling that, the liberal justices say, will make proving racial discrimination in redistricting virtually impossible.
“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent.
“Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic,” she continued. “The majority claims only to be “updat[ing]” our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law…”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by all five other justices in the bench’s right wing. Kagan was joined in her dissent by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Clarence Thomas also wrote a concurrence joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Alito defangs the law by unilaterally cancelling out congressional fixes to it — primarily, that plaintiffs bringing claims of racial vote dilution no longer have to prove that the legislators drawing the maps did so to purposefully discriminate. This bar had proved so difficult to overcome, especially as legislators became more adept at using facially neutral language, that Congress adopted amendments to the VRA asserting that if the maps have a discriminatory effect, that’s enough. Chief Justice John Roberts, then working in the Reagan administration, spearheaded the unsuccessful effort to doom the passage of those amendments.
Alito hand waves this history away, in part, by echoing Roberts’ reasoning in an earlier decision that eviscerated the VRA’s preclearance requirement, which required jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination in voting to submit changes in election laws to the federal government for clearance before they could take effect. Roberts, in Shelby County v. Holder, said that the country had made such great strides in racial equality that the preventative measure was no longer necessary — ushering in a flood of new voter restrictions, particularly in the states that comprised the old Confederacy.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination,” Alito wrote.
He also grounds his ruling in the 15th Amendment, a grotesque perversion of the Reconstruction Amendments to justify an opinion that will disenfranchise Black voters and, likely, severely diminish Black representation in the south.
In her dissent, Kagan traces the Roberts Court’s unrelenting hostility to the VRA, from Shelby County in 2013 to Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, which essentially ended plaintiffs’ ability to use the VRA to overturn discriminatory voting practices, and now to Louisiana v. Callais, which destroys the law’s last remaining weapon.
Today’s finding, she wrote, is the “last, and surely the hardest, for just three Terms ago the Court upheld a vote-dilution challenge to a districting map in a case much like this one — preserving Section 2 as a tool to prevent racially discriminatory redistricting.”
She adds: “It avails itself again of the tools used before to dismantle the Act: untenable readings of statutory text, made-up and impossible-to-meet evidentiary requirements, disregard for precedent, and disdain for congressional judgment.”
Read the opinion here:
