The Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday, ruling that a congressional map in Louisiana was a racial gerrymander even though it was drawn to comply with the landmark law aimed at protecting minority voters.
The justices, split 6-3 with the court’s conservatives in the majority, told states they can almost never consider race when they draw maps to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters who long faced discrimination in elections.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that while there may be extreme situations in which the use of race can be justified to draw maps, no such conditions existed in the Louisiana case. As a result, the new map was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” he added.
The decision means Louisiana will need to redraw its map. Other states could try to do so, as well, although there is little time this year with primaries underway ahead of November’s midterm congressional elections. Louisiana’s primary is May 16, just two weeks away.
Longer term, the ruling could lead to fewer minority-majority districts not just in Congress but also in state and local government, reducing the number of nonwhite elected officials.
While the court had previously assumed that states could consider race in seeking to comply with the Voting Rights Act, Alito wrote that “allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost any other context.”
In justifying the court’s change of course, Alito highlighted developments in recent years, including “social change” in the South, where most of the race-based redistricting challenges arise. He also cited the court’s 2019 decision that paved the way to unfettered partisan gerrymandering.
Demonstrators outside the Supreme Court in Washington on Oct. 15.Eric Lee / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
As a result, when civil rights plaintiffs challenge newly drawn maps, states can argue as a defense that they were merely seeking to maximize partisan advantage. In the South in particular, party preference is often aligned with race, with most Black people voting for Democrats.
In a separate concurring opinion, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, a longtime critic of the Voting Rights Act, said the ruling should “largely put an end” to a system that he saw as unlawfully dividing people into districts based on race.
The three liberal justices dissented, with Elena Kagan writing that the “consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave” and that the ruling effectively “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”
“Under the court’s new view of Section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan said.
In interviews, voting rights advocates characterized the ruling as the end of redistricting cases under Section 2, arguing that they will be impossible to win.
“This is a full gut. This is burn the house down and pretend the house still exists because you can point to where the foundation used to be,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who was a redistricting adviser in the Biden White House.
Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Washington, D.C., office of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said, “With a rather cynical claim that race discrimination is rare in the South now, Justice Alito essentially shrugs at the millions of voters whose ability to elect representatives of their choice have greatly improved with Section 2.”
Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, called it a betrayal. “The Supreme Court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy,” he said. “This ruling is a major setback for our nation and threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled and died for.”
Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, Liz Murrill, and the White House celebrated the decision, with Murrill calling it “seismic.”
“I vigorously defended our first map and said then that the only way to draw a second majority-minority district was to expressly take race into account,” Murrill said in a statement. “It is gratifying that the Supreme Court has finally vindicated our original position and, in doing so, clarified that only under very narrow circumstances—where there is proof of intentional discrimination—may race be used as a remedy under Section 2.”
President Donald Trump praised the ruling on Truth Social, calling it “a BIG WIN for Equal Protection under the Law.”
“Thank you to brilliant Justice Samuel Alito for authoring this important and appropriate Opinion. Congratulations!” Trump added.
The court has taken chunks out of the Voting Rights Act twice via major rulings issued in 2013 and 2021. In 2023, the court, in an unexpected decision that appeared to buttress the voting law, struck down Republican-drawn congressional districts in Alabama.
The court ruled in the Louisiana case that the state unlawfully considered race when it redrew its congressional map in 2024.
The state originally drew a map after the 2020 census that included just one majority-Black district out of six in a state where a third of the population is Black.
A lower court found that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, so the state redrew it in 2024 to have two majority-Black districts. The Supreme Court has now found that map to be unlawful, too, but for different reasons.
The case touches upon what conservatives see as a tension between the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s 14th and 15th amendments, which were enacted after the Civil War to ensure equal rights for former slaves, including the right to vote.
Conservatives view those amendments as requiring an entirely “colorblind” approach to the law, a view that liberals reject.
The Louisiana case initially reached the court on a narrower legal question, but the justices themselves expanded its importance by setting a second round of oral arguments on the broader constitutional issue of whether race can be considered in redistricting when states seek to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Louisiana, which initially defended its new map, switched sides and joined a group of self-identified “non-African-American” voters who sued to block it on constitutional grounds. The Trump administration later joined the case in support of the state.
On Wednesday, attorneys for one of the voters who sued asked the Supreme Court to expedite its transmission of a certified copy of the ruling to the relevant district court because of Louisiana’s upcoming primaries.
Traditionally, the clerk of the Supreme Court doesn’t send a certified copy of a judgment and an opinion to the lower court until 32 days after the judgment is entered.
The Louisiana primary is scheduled for May 16, and the second party primary is set for June 27, meaning “a delay of 32 days might well endanger this process,” the attorneys for one of the voters argued.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the request for expedited transmission in the coming days.
SOURCE: nbcnews.com