US Supreme Court weakens voting rights law in major ruling; limits protections for minority voters
The US Supreme Court on Wednesday gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act – making it harder for minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark civil rights law – in a victory for Louisiana Republicans and President Donald Trump’s administration.
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling powered by the court’s conservative members, blocked an electoral map that had given the state a second Black-majority congressional district. The court’s three liberals and legal experts denounced the decision as hollowing out Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress enacted to bar electoral maps that would result in diluting the clout of minority voters.
Louisiana elections
The full impact of the ruling on November’s midterms was not immediately clear, though experts said it is possible states may try to enact new maps as a result of the decision. Louisiana has a primary election set for May 16.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The ruling was authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by his five fellow conservative justices. The three liberal justices dissented.
The Voting Rights Act
The Louisiana case involved a central element of the Voting Rights Act. The law’s Section 2 was passed by Congress to prohibit electoral maps that would result in undermining the clout of minority voters, even without direct proof of racist intent.
Alito wrote that the focus of Section 2 must now be to enforce the Constitution’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination under the 15th Amendment.
“Only when understood this way does (Section 2) of the Voting Rights Act properly fit within Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment enforcement power,” Alito wrote.
Interpreting Section 2 to “outlaw a map solely because it fails to provide a sufficient number of majority-minority districts would create a right that the Amendment does not protect,” Alito added.
The ruling was issued amid a battle unfolding in Republican-governed and Democratic-led states around the country involving the redrawing of electoral maps to change the composition of congressional districts for partisan advantage ahead of the November congressional elections.
Trump’s party is aiming in the elections to retain the now razor-thin Republican majorities in the US House of Representatives and Senate.
This provision gained greater significance as a bulwark against racial discrimination in voting after the Supreme Court, in a 2013 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, gutted a different part of the same law.
Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent joined by the two other liberal justices, said that the ruling will have major consequences.
“Under the court’s new view of Section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updating’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks,” Kagan said.
“But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law, so that it will not remedy even the classic example of vote dilution given above.”
The administration backed the challenge made in the Louisiana case to the Voting Rights Act, advocating for raising the bar for proving a Section 2 violation.