Supreme Court Limits Voting Rights Act
politico.com
politico.com
Exactly. The purpose of the VRA is to ban racial discrimination in voting. That’s why the Supreme Court ruled that you can’t use race to draw district lines. You can’t try to create white majority districts because you think that’ll get white candidates elected. And for the same reason you can’t do that if you replace “white” with any other group.
The article then conjures up a different purpose for the VRA: deliberately using race to increase the prospects of minorities being elected. The article concedes that was added as an interpretive gloss after the fact. But it condemns the Supreme Court for interpreting the VRA consistent with the law’s actual purpose instead of this other purpose that courts came up with after the fact. That’s what it means when it says the Court “limited” the VRA. It means that the Court limited the scope of the law with regards to this after-the-fact purpose.
The civil rights laws prohibit treating individuals differently based on race. That’s what they say and that’s what they were trying to achieve. Unless expressly stated, they were not designed to be a remedial system that allowed racial discrimination so long as the people doing it purported to have good intentions.
Nearly a third of the state’s residents are Black. However, the Republicans, who hold a majority in the Louisiana legislature and also hold the governorship, drew the congressional districts in such a way that Black voters had a majority in only one out of six districts.
Activists and organizations filed a lawsuit challenging this. The state subsequently revised the district boundaries so that two of the six districts had a majority of Black voters, reflecting their proportion of the population.
In response, a group of white citizens who felt they were being discriminated against filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court.
The court has now ruled in favor of these plaintiffs. In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions.
This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress.
It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately. Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens. That did not change until the 1860s, after the abolition of slavery had been decided through the most violent conflict in U.S. history.
Like other advocates of “colorblindness,” Alito now invokes, of all things, the constitutional amendment adopted at that time and the Equal Protection Clause it contains, which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law.
Yet this clause was specifically intended to safeguard the interests of minorities. And it took nearly another century and an additional law to force the Southern states to apply this part of the Constitution.
As early as 2013, the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
Until then, states that had previously enacted racist laws to discriminate against voters needed permission from the federal government if they wanted to change their election laws. The Supreme Court struck down this requirement, reasoning that the conditions that had made this restriction necessary no longer existed.
As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once remarked that this was like throwing away your umbrella in the pouring rain just because you didn’t get wet under it. She would be horrified to see how some of her former colleagues are now, some six years after her death, further eroding the hard-won civil rights. And this just a few months before the 250th anniversary of the United States.
But at its core, it simply follows a tradition that is as old as the nation itself. Every step forward that brings the United States closer to fulfilling the promise it made at its founding, yet denied to a large portion of its population, that all people are created equal and must therefore have equal rights, is followed by a step backward.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 significantly increased the proportion of Black voters. But efforts to weaken the law have been going on for just as long as the law itself. Now, with the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court that Donald Trump helped create, those efforts have succeeded.
The coming months and years will likely reveal what happened after the initial ruling in 2013. States used the Supreme Court’s decision as a pretext for implementing numerous measures that made it particularly difficult for Black voters to cast their ballots. Now the Court has set another precedent.
Therefore the title "Supreme Court limits the voting rights act" is correct. To be more specific it is missing a ",again".
As you might have noticed, for months now, a redistricting war, a veritable battle over the drawing of electoral districts, has been raging in various states.
Sadly, the Democrats have also gotten drawn into it, adopting the motto “fight fire with fire”, and now want to manipulate electoral districts to their own advantage in order to keep up with the Republicans.
The latter now see this as their chance to prevent defeat in the November congressional elections.
In Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, all states in the Deep South of the U.S. where people were once enslaved and which later enacted racist discrimination laws, leading Republicans are already planning special legislative sessions to quickly approve redistricting plans.
Marsha Blackburn, a staunchly pro-Trump senator from Tennessee who is running for governor there, posted a map of her state on social media in which every single county is colored red as in the color of the Republican Party.
They no longer need to worry about anyone stopping her. The Supreme Court has made sure of that.
Shameful.
"Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens."
They were not counted as three fifths of a person in a way that matters for what we talk about today. They got zero percent of the vote they deserved. They probably got, on average, quite substantially less than three fifths of the respect and dignity they deserved. They were counted as three fifths of a person for how much they magnified the power of the votes of their captors and how much taxes their State had to pay. Slavery would have been every bit as wrong if they were counted as whole persons (or half persons, non-persons, double persons) for apportionment and taxation.
That’s the expected outcome in the absence of racial discrimination. If a group is 1/3 of the state population, and you divide it into districts, you’d expect the population to be 1/3 in each of those districts as well. If there is not an even population distribution you might expect one district to be majority minority. But two would require extreme gerrymandering unless the population distribution was highly uneven.
> In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions.
Yes, absolutely. This is a core principle, and a necessary principle in a multi-racial democracy. Especially one like ours, which has no majority race any longer.
> This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress.
Creating race-based voting districts is the opposite of social progress. The idea of organizing politics along racial lines—and drawing that into our voting maps—is retrograde and racist.
> It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately.
It wasn’t, then we fought a big war, and we got the 14th amendment, which was designed to be color blind. It was designed to protect the interest of minorities in being treated identically without regard to race. So were the civil rights Laws.
You should watch the movie “RBG.” Justice Ginsberg built her career as a lawyer advocating to interpret the laws regarding sex discrimination in exactly the same way Justice Alito interprets the laws regarding race discrimination. She represented men challenging laws that purportedly discriminated in favor of women. Her argument was the laws say “equal,” and they mean what they say. They don’t permit discrimination in either direction.
> As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished
It doesn’t matter whether racism has “vanished.” Two wrongs don’t make a right. The government can’t discriminate based on race in one place to cancel out asserted race discrimination in another place. If you want to combat racism, you have to do it directly.
The appeals to history also ring hollow. It’s not 1965. Today, whites in Louisiana will overwhelmingly vote for a non-white who shares their politics over a white who doesn’t. In 2007, a brown guy became the first non-incumbent in a Louisiana history to win the governor’s race in the first round without a runoff.