Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“The U.S. Supreme Court, hearing arguments Wednesday over a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, appeared inclined to limit the use of the landmark law to force states to draw electoral districts favorable to minority voters…
“The court’s six conservative justices seemed like they would vote to effectively strike down a Black majority House district in Louisiana because it relied too heavily on race, as lawyers for Louisiana and the Trump administration tried to persuade the court to wipe the district away…
“A ruling for Louisiana could open the door for legislatures to redraw congressional maps across the South, potentially boosting Republican electoral prospects by eliminating majority Black and Latino districts that tend to favor Democrats. It would also make it much harder, if not impossible, to take account of race in redistricting.” AP News
The left worries that the Court will end the requirement for majority-minority districts.
“In 2022, Louisiana Republican lawmakers enacted a congressional map that ‘packed’ Black Louisianans into one district and ‘cracked’ them across five others. This means out of six districts, only one is majority-Black, even though 1 in 3 Louisianans are Black. Under the Voting Rights Act, voters of color must have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. But voting in Louisiana is racially polarized…
“With no check against racial gerrymandering, a system in which voters ostensibly pick their elected officials would become one in which elected officials are freer than ever to pick their voters, leaving Black voters with even fewer legal avenues to secure fair representation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were expressly crafted to grant Black people equal rights as citizens in a democratic society. The Court is preparing to use those very Amendments to deny those rights instead.”
Madiba K. Dennie, Balls and Strikes
“Critics of the Voting Rights Act would have you believe that protecting the rights of minority voters is by definition redistricting by race. They argue that standards should be colorblind and that America’s strides toward greater racial equality make voting protections unnecessary. History illustrates the farce of this argument. Grandfather clauses, poll taxes and literacy tests were all technically colorblind…
“Louisiana’s literacy test is cited in schools across the country as a textbook example of how purportedly neutral standards can be used for discriminatory ends. Today’s numbers tell the same story. Approximately one-third of Louisiana is Black. In our state’s entire history, only five Black citizens have been elected to the U.S. House and served, out of 171 Louisianans sent to the House… The law represents progress on our nation’s trek to a more perfect union. We must not allow the erosion of its promise.”
Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, New York Times
“Since 1965, Section 2 [of the VRA] has given people of color a seat at the table, from school boards to the halls of Congress. It appears this 60-year era is coming to an end…
“A decision overturning or crippling Section 2 would turbocharge the GOP’s current gerrymandering efforts. The loss of Section 2 would be devastating for communities of color and the Democratic candidates they tend to support, costing Democrats up to 19 House seats. As much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats.”
Pema Levy and Ari Berman, Mother Jones
The right urges the Court to end the requirement for majority-minority districts.
The right urges the Court to end the requirement for majority-minority districts.
“The Court’s conservatives have spent decades warning that the VRA was in desperate need of congressional fine-tuning, but Congress failed to heed these admonitions. In 1993, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that racial gerrymandering threatens to ‘carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters,’ adding that it ‘may balkanize us into competing factions.’…
“‘As a practical political matter,’ Justice [Clarence] Thomas wrote the following year, ‘our drive to segregate political districts by race can only serve to deepen racial divisions by destroying any need for voters or candidates to build bridges between racial groups or to form voting coalitions.’”
Noah Rothman, National Review
“As U.S. deputy solicitor general Hashim Mooppan noted, only 15 of Congress’s roughly 60 current black Members represent such districts. Black Members, like white Members, win seats more often by appealing to multiracial coalitions. The goal of Section 2 was to prevent the likes of poll taxes, not to give partisans an excuse to use race as an excuse to gerrymander or to challenge state Congressional maps in court by playing the race card.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Liberals insist that every provision of the Voting Rights Act is as necessary today as it was six decades ago. But times have changed… In 1964, a year before the Voting Rights Act passed, black voter registration in Mississippi was less than 7%, the lowest in the region. Two years later, it was nearly 60%. Black voter registration in the South today is higher than it is in other parts of the country, and black voter registration nationwide has been rising for the past three decades…
“Black voter turnout peaked with the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, when it exceeded the white turnout rate. In 2016 it receded somewhat, but only to the pre-Obama norm. In 2020 black turnout was the third highest on record, behind 2008 and 2012. It declined in 2024, but so did turnout for whites and Hispanics…
“The political left will decry any tampering with racial gerrymanders, but it’s past time for the Supreme Court to end the ugly practice of collecting black people into a single district to ensure the election of a black candidate. It wrongly assumes all black voters—rich, poor, rural, urban—share the same political interests. It wrongly assumes white voters won’t pull the lever for black candidates. And it allows Democrats to exploit the Voting Rights Act to gain a partisan advantage.”
Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal
“As a practical matter, the Voting Rights Act helps one political party and hurts the other party. When a Republican legislature draws a gerrymandered map, Democrats will claim that the map harms African American or Hispanic voters. But when a Democratic legislature draws a gerrymandered map, Republicans will have a hard time raising a Section 2 claim that the map harms White voters…
“I see a similar argument over mid-decade redistricting. If Texas redistricts, then California should redistrict as well. Fair elections, the argument goes, depends on red states not having an advantage over blue states. But this is precisely what the VRA accomplishes: burdening red states, but not burdening blue states. Callais would eliminate the asymmetry. Going forward, neither party would benefit from a VRA bonus.”
Josh Blackman, Volokh Conspiracy
