John Roberts’ legacy of removing race protections sees defining moment

of the Supreme Court decision Wednesday’s rollback of protections for Black and Latino voters marks another dramatic turn in conservative justices’ long efforts to overturn measures vital to overcoming America’s legacy of racial discrimination.

The decision also marks a defining moment for the court under the Chief Justice john robertsShortly after joining the bench in 2005, he declared: “The way to stop race-based discrimination is to stop race-based discrimination.”

Three years ago, the justices voted the same 6-3 as on Wednesday. ended racial affirmative action in higher education admissions. The latest decision comes after a series of decisions led by Roberts and Justice. Samuel Alito limiting the scope of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, will resonate deeper.

Taken as a whole, this pattern will mean that minority voters have a reduced chance of electing candidates of their choice. This will mean fewer opportunities for blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities to have their voices heard in government.

The seriousness of such consequences and the deep-rooted divisions among the justices were clear when the opinion was announced from the courtroom podium.

Roberts said Alito had the majority opinion when first announcing the outcome of Louisiana v. Callais. Roberts, whose seniority gave him the power to appoint, had assigned the case to a longtime colleague with whom he had worked on racial issues.

Contrary to the historic nature of the decision, Alito began with his usual dry tone, detailing the lower court case in the long-running Louisiana case that began with redistricting after the 2020 census. He explained the intricacies of the VRA’s controversial Section 2, which prohibits discrimination, and described the evolution of standards for assessing when Black and other minority voters can succeed in fighting district maps that diminish their voting power.

Such dilution may result, for example, from the ways in which legislatures are “dissolved” and “packaged,” that is, the distribution or concentration of Black voters across districts to weaken their overall voting power.

Alito said opponents can no longer point to vote dilution effects. Instead, they would have to show that state lawmakers likely had a discriminatory intent or, as Alito put it in his opinion, “the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination has occurred.”

Alito’s panel statement and written opinion on behalf of six conservative justices relied heavily on Roberts’ 2013 decision. Shelby County / Holder The voting guarantees enshrined in 1965 are no longer necessary for America, he said.

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“(V)arious social change has occurred all over the country, and especially in the South…” Alito wrote. Adapting a line from Roberts’ 2013 decision, he added: “As this Court has acknowledged, ‘things have changed dramatically’ in the decades since the Voting Rights Act was passed.”

When Justice Elena Kagan, seated next to Alito on the high bench, spoke on behalf of the three dissenting liberals, she referred clearly and emphatically to Shelby County and the cases that have gutted voting rights protections.

“This court’s project to destroy the Voting Rights Act is now complete,” he declared. “It was born from the true blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” he said of the action.

As both Roberts and Alito looked expressionlessly at the audience, Kagan said: “For more than a decade, this court has set its sights on the Voting Rights Act.”

In fact, Wednesday’s decision might have been inevitable, given the bench that has changed since Roberts took control two decades ago. He was joined by four new conservative justices, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term.

Now the Roberts Court’s goal aligns distinctly with Trump’s efforts to diminish voting rights protections and influence the upcoming midterm elections. Officials in some Republican-majority states, including Florida, moved quickly on Wednesday to take advantage of the decision and redraw their maps.

And with what Kagan described as the court’s “fabricated and impossible-to-meet standards of evidence,” he warned that the decision “greenlights district plans” that would disadvantage minorities across the country.

George W. Bush candidates working together

Roberts led the court to end race-based policies in public schools, higher education and, most importantly, voting laws. With a few exceptions, he was in sync with Alito, who joined the bench in January 2006, four months after Roberts.

Both men were appointed by President George W. Bush, and although they differ in temperament and institutional outlook, they are often together.

When Roberts held key roles in the Ronald Reagan and then George H. W. Bush administrations in the 1980s and 1990s, he advocated a limited interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. In memos from that period, Roberts showed that he believed federal protections for Black, Hispanic and other minority voters dating back to the civil rights era in the 1960s were no longer guaranteed.

Only since becoming chief justice has he been able to realize his vision. That was a vision Alito crafted throughout Wednesday’s opinion.

He included several references to the landmark Shelby County decision. In that 2013 case, the majority struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to get Justice Department approval before changing election procedures.

Alito joined him in 2013 and previously in a 2006 case. “This is disgusting business, it is dividing us by race,” Roberts wrote. (Alito was the only justice to sign this opinion, partial dissent, and concurrence in the Texas redistricting dispute.)

“The way to stop segregation on the basis of race is to stop segregation on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote in the school integration debate in 2007.

Alito joined the chief justice there with other conservatives in 2023 when Roberts led the court to end racial affirmative action. Alito also made a brief reference to the Harvard case on Wednesday.

Midterm exams are approaching

Wednesday’s action, the most significant step in the nation’s history of racial segregation, further weakened the iconic 1965 Voting Rights Act, which brought voting rights to black voters and other racial minorities who were kept from the polls.

The VRA was adopted only after the “Bloody Sunday” attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. During the match on March 7, 1965, Sheriff’s deputies beat civil rights marchers trying to cross the bridge

With such a history, this area of ​​the law has long been sharply divided, and there were previous signs that the justices were struggling with the Louisiana debate.

The Louisiana case was first argued two years ago, but the justices later called for a reshuffle, foreshadowing that conservatives could be headed for a major ruling that would impact voting rights not just in Louisiana but across the country.

A lower federal court found that Louisiana lawmakers likely violated the 2nd Amendment and ordered the creation of a second majority-black district. (Previously, only one of Louisiana’s six congressional districts had a Black majority.)

A group of White residents later objected to the redrawn map, arguing that Section 2’s common solution amounted to a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equality. The group noted the high court’s broader bias against race-based programs.

Justices broke somewhat from that pattern in a 2023 redistricting case in Alabama, stating that the use of race to make up for an earlier discriminatory map might not only be permissible but also necessary. This will now be seen as a one-time thing.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court clearly did not go as far as White opponents wanted, banning any consideration of race to correct an allegedly biased map. Still, in a world where redistricting is highly partisan, it would be difficult for any opponent to produce evidence that a district was drawn not for any political reason but specifically to weaken the voting power of Blacks or Latinos.

Alito’s majority comes from a 2021 decision he wrote in the Arizona case. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. There, the same six-judge majority limited the scope of Voting Rights Act Section 2 to certain election practices that do not involve redistricting. The court upheld requirements to discard ballots cast in the wrong precinct and criminalized third-party harvesting of ballots (such as those sometimes cast in the state’s remote tribal areas).

Alito noted that the decision is another precedent that paves the way for a view on the VRA’s liability only if a practice is motivated by a discriminatory purpose.

Kagan did not dispute this claim, instead using it to bolster her case that the conservative majority had strategically built up this point; He said this moment contradicts the fundamental goal of the Voting Rights Act.

“Even after the Fifteenth Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, state officials routinely denied African Americans their right to vote,” he recounted.

“Through a seemingly limitless number of mechanisms—many of which are ostensibly race-neutral and the drawing of district lines among them—States have either prevented Black citizens from voting or ensured that their votes are worth almost nothing,” Kagan wrote.

“The Voting Rights Act was meant to be corrective,” he added.

In 2013, Roberts and on Wednesday Alito acknowledged the legacy surrounding the Voting Rights Act. But as with the 2013 turning point, Alito and others in the majority used that success to brush aside the remaining effects of racial bias.

Quoting Roberts in 2013, Alito wrote Wednesday: “‘(O)our nation has made great progress in eliminating racial discrimination in voting.”

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