Supreme Court might upend Voting Rights Act and help GOP keep control of the House

WASHINGTON— The Supreme Court could help the GOP retain control of the House of Representatives next year by clearing the way for Republican-led states to redraw electoral districts currently held by Black Democrats.

That possibility formed the backdrop Wednesday, when the justices debated the future of the Voting Rights Act in a Louisiana case.

Trump administration The most senior lawyer in the courtroom warned It deserves to be ruled that partisan politics, not racial justice, should guide the drawing of electoral districts for Congress and state legislatures.

“This court has determined that race-based affirmative action in higher education must end,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in his brief. The same goes for using the Voting Rights Act to determine legislative districts that are likely to elect a Black or Latino candidate, he said.

Civil rights law, he said, is often “used as a form of affirmative action based on electoral competition to undo a state’s constitutional pursuit of political ends.”

The court’s conservatives leaned in that direction and sought to limit the use of race in drawing district boundaries. But the five-member majority did not oppose the use of race in drawing district boundaries.

But the Trump administration and Louisiana’s Republican leaders have argued that now is the time to do so.

If the court’s conservatives make such a decision in the coming months, it would allow Republican-led states in the South to redraw congressional districts for a dozen or more Black Democrats.

“There is cause for alarm,” said Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos. “The consequences of minority representation will likely be devastating. In particular, states with unified Republican governments will have the green light to flip as many Democratic minority opportunity districts as possible.”

Such a decision would also overturn the Voting Rights Act as understood since the 1980s.

The historic measure, first enacted in 1965, kept the federal government on the side of Black people in voting and registering to vote.

But by 1982, Republicans and Democrats in Congress realized that these new Black voters were often unable to elect anyone into office. White lawmakers could draw maps that put white majorities in all or nearly all of the districts.

Seeking a change, Congress amended the law to allow legal challenges if discrimination resulted in minority voters having “less opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.”

Decades later, the Supreme Court and the Justice Department pressured states, especially the South, to draw at least some electoral districts that could elect a black candidate. These legal challenges revealed evidence that white voters in the state would not support a Black candidate.

But since joining the court in 1991, Justice Clarence Thomas has argued that determining districts by race is unconstitutional and should be banned. Justices Samuel A. Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissented from Thomas two years ago when the court confirmed by a 5-4 vote the second congressional district in Alabama that elected a Black Democrat.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote the opinion. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh voted fifth but also said he was open to the argument that “race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

That matter is now in court In the Louisiana case.

It has six congressional districts and about a third of its population is black.

Prior to that decade, the New Orleans district had been electing a Black representative, and in response to the voting rights lawsuit, a second district was ordered to be drawn where a Black candidate had a good chance of winning.

But the state drew a new, tall district that elected Black Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields to protect the House’s leading Republicans (Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise).

Now the state and the Trump administration are arguing that the court should close that district because it was determined based on race, leaving the state free to replace him with a white Republican.