US supreme court ‘demolishes’ Voting Rights Act, gutting provision that prevented racial discrimination | US supreme court

US supreme court ruled Louisiana will need to redraw its congressional map in a landmark decision that effectively kills a large portion of the Voting Rights Act.

In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court struck down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last strong provision of the 1965 civil rights act preventing racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure that minority voters are treated fairly, especially in redistricting.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority opinion: “To allow race to play any role in government decision-making would amount to a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every context.” “Compliance with Section 2 cannot justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the Central District’s decision, while understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

The court’s decision is a major revolution in U.S. civil rights law, allowing lawmakers to craft districting plans that would weaken the influence of Black and other minority voters. Some states may even seek to redraw districts ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissenting opinion that the court had now “repealed the Voting Rights Act.” He wrote that the court’s decision on Wednesday is the latest in a series that has struck down the law, including a landmark ruling in the 2013 case: Shelby County v HolderThis overruled another key provision in the law that required places with a history of discrimination to be pre-approved by the federal government before changes could take effect..

“Under the Court’s new opinion on Section 2, a state can systematically dilute the voting power of minority citizens without legal consequence,” Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Majority claim it’s just an ‘update'[ing]’ It’s as if our chapter 2 law has been amended with a few technical changes. In fact, these ‘updates’ undermine the law.”

“Today’s decision completely invalidates section 2,” he continued. “The decision here concerns Louisiana’s 6th district. But it also concerns Louisiana’s 2nd district. Likewise, it applies to many other districts, especially those in the south, that have given minority citizens, and especially African Americans, a meaningful political voice over the last half century. As of today, these districts exist only by toleration, and probably will not last.”

At the heart of the Louisiana v. Callais case was the thorny question of how much consideration lawmakers were allowed to take race into account when redrawing districts to ensure black voters were adequately represented. The high court first heard oral arguments in the case last March, but took the unusual step of asking attorneys to argue the case again last fall. The justices, who prepared the case for retrial, increased the seriousness of the case by asking attorneys to focus on whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was constitutional.

In its decision on Wednesday, the court’s majority refrained from explicitly saying that Section 2 was unconstitutional. Instead, the majority significantly revised the three-part test that plaintiffs must pass to win the section 2 redistricting test. The new test is much harder to pass and is designed to require plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination; This is an extremely difficult burden.

“In short, Section 2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the state knowingly used its districts to give minority voters fewer opportunities because of their race,” Alito wrote.

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, says such a statement is “incompatible not only with the text but also with the history of section 2.” wrote in a blog post. In 1982, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to clarify that proof of intentional discrimination was not required to win a case under section 2.

For decades, the first part of the three-part test in a Part 2 case required plaintiffs to show that the minority group claiming discrimination was large and compact enough to constitute a majority in a single-member district. Alito’s decision adds two new requirements: plaintiffs must not consider race when drawing a hypothetical alternative map and must also ensure that it meets the state’s traditional districting criteria and partisan goals.

This amendment alone is a major blow to the Voting Rights Act. Voting in the U.S. South is highly racially polarized, so drawing a desegregated district would also affect the partisan makeup of the map. It may be impossible for a state to achieve partisan goals without discriminating against minority voters.

It also gives lawmakers nearly unlimited leeway to justify drawing districts that discriminate based on race, Kagan wrote.

“Suppose the state claims to have drawn the lines to protect an incumbent favored by Black residents,” he wrote. “The possibilities are endless. And each would produce the same result. Because the Chapter 2 plaintiff’s map fails to adequately advance the specific political (or other) goals that favor the candidate of Black voters’ choice, the case will fail—even if the election year and the votes of non-Black people were made to mean nothing by the end of the election year.”

The second and third conditions of the traditional test require plaintiffs to show that the minority group was politically aligned and that the majority group voted as a bloc to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate. Alito’s new test requires plaintiffs to show that allegiance stems specifically from race, not party. This is extremely difficult to do when race and party are often intertwined.

“Thus, in presenting evidence of polarized vote preferences, plaintiff must remove polarized vote preferences from the equation,” Kagan wrote. “Partisan diversity is the way these different preferences are expressed, and the vote of one racial group can repeatedly trump the vote of another.”

As part of Chapter 2 cases, courts have also looked at the “totality of the circumstances” to assess whether the political process is equally open to minority voters. Plaintiffs often present evidence of the lingering effects of the legacy of discrimination to show that discrimination still exists. The court’s new test says the evaluation must focus on “contemporary intentional racial discrimination in voting.” Such direct evidence of intentional racial discrimination is rarely available.

“Much less weight should be given to present-day inequalities that are characterized as ongoing ‘effects of social discrimination,’ as well as discrimination that occurred some time ago,” Alito wrote.

The decision comes after this Years of legal wrangling It exceeds the boundaries of the map.

After the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled state legislature drew a new congressional map in which black voters constituted a majority in only one district, despite being about a third of the state’s population. A group of Black voters sued the state under the Voting Rights Act in 2022, arguing that the map reduced Black voters’ influence in the state by concentrating them in one district and scattering them in the remaining districts.

Black voters won the case, and a federal judge blocked Louisiana from using the map and ordered the state to draw a new map with a second-majority Black district. The state complied with this draw a new map The second is a majority-Black congressional district that runs diagonally across the state from Shreveport to Baton Rouge.

But a group of non-Black voters objected to this new map, claiming voters were unlawfully sorted by race, in violation of the 14th amendment’s equal protection guarantee. A panel of three judges We agreed with these plaintiffs and prevented the new map from coming into force last year. This decision was stopped by the high court and the solution map was used in the 2024 elections held last fall. Black Democrat Cleo Fields won the seat.

Plaintiffs’ attorney Edward Greim said during oral arguments in March that race was dominant because the district’s shape was irregular.

But lawyers representing Louisiana and the Black voters who filed the original claim said there was a clear explanation for the strange shape. When Louisiana Republicans drew the map, they wanted to preserve the safe seats of House Speaker Mike Johnson; House majority leader Steve Scalise; and House appropriations committee member Julia Letlow. They had rejected the possibility of drawing a more compact district to protect these seats.