Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has overseen the Supreme Court’s steady dismantling of the nation’s core voter-protection law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So it was a bad sign when the court took a case on a discriminatory Alabama congressional district map that lower courts had condemned. Judging from how the oral arguments proceeded on Oct. 4, the court might well weaken the act further, based on an implausible reading of the law, with potentially dire consequences for minority voters’ ability to elect candidates who represent them.
The Roberts court should end its assault on the Voting Rights Act
The case should be simple — a “slam dunk,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it. Alabama’s legislature drew a congressional district map that packed Black voters into one district and dispersed the rest into majority-White districts. Though the state is 27 percent Black, African Americans had a reasonable chance of electing a candidate of their choice in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts, given how strongly the state’s voting patterns correlate with race.
Those who are challenging the legislature’s redistricting plan generated maps showing that the state could have created a second district in which Black voters had a shot at electing someone who represents them — and that these alternative maps still respected traditional redistricting principles, such as keeping districts compact. This is a crucial step in such lawsuits, because it shows that the state has viable alternatives that are fairer to Black voters.
Alabama’s lawyers argued that these fairer maps are irrelevant, because the challengers considered race to draw them. The state’s mapmakers did not use race as an explicit factor in drawing their lines, they argued, and the court should insist that the challengers show that they can create fairer maps based solely on race-neutral factors.
In other words, the state argued that those challenging a congressional map for having racially discriminatory effects, which Alabama’s plainly does, should have to do so without taking race into account in a key part of the process. Yet Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 explicitly to help minority voting groups gain power at the ballot box. “Indifference to racial equality is exactly what [the act] is barring or prohibiting,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized.
Though the court’s conservative justices appeared unreceptive to some of Alabama’s most sweeping arguments, they seemed ready to uphold the state’s map, anyway. If they do so, the way that they rule could have vast consequences for minority voting rights. The court has already neutered the Voting Rights Act’s Section 5, which contained the law’s most robust check on states seeking to impose discriminatory voting policies. Then, last year, the justices weakened the act’s Section 2, which allows minority voters to challenge such policies in court. In this latest voting rights case, the court is poised to erode Section 2 still further, raising yet more barriers to those asking federal judges to restrain states from diminishing their ability to participate meaningfully in the political process.
A further assault on the Voting Rights Act would undermine both the intent of a law that was a signature achievement of the civil rights era and the meaningful participation of all Americans in the democratic system.
Source: WP
