Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Supreme Court has made it easier for policymakers to dilute the power of voters of color, or those in a language minority group, in a dangerous ruling that undermines the anti-discriminatory values of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
In a ruling issued this morning in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court effectively allowed for the creation of racially discriminatory political maps across the country, impacting representation in all levels of government, from Congress to the local school boards.
“Today the Court dealt a severe blow to free and fair elections in the United States. The Voting Rights Act, passed by a bipartisan majority after the nation witnessed the horrors of racially motivated state-inflicted violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, has been a crown jewel of our nation’s civil rights protections and has been essential to voting rights in the United States. As it has done with so many of our nation’s protections, the U.S. Supreme Court majority has significantly harmed voting rights and, in so doing, the American people,” said Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward. “This decision will open the door to anti-democratic suppression of the right to vote, making it easier for a revival of Jim Crow tactics and diluting the power of voters of color. While this is a sad day for our democracy and fair representation in America, the path forward is clear: we must recommit to protecting and exercising our right to vote and to using our voices to oppose extreme power grabs of state and federal governments that seek to subvert the voices and votes of the people. We must hold those in power who have — for too long — opposed or delayed progress toward more comprehensive voting protections to account. Our team at Democracy Forward believes in the power of the people in this nation. We are resolute in our commitment to protecting the people, voting access, and free and fair elections, even if the Court’s majority did not.”
The case was brought by a group of non-Black voters in Louisiana who argued that a court order requiring the state to add a second majority-Black district to address clear racial discrimination in how district maps were initially drawn violated the Equal Protection Clause. Though Louisiana reluctantly defended its new district, the state asked the Supreme Court to address the alleged conflict between Section 2 of the VRA, which protects against racially discriminatory redistricting, and other recent precedents emphasizing race neutrality. The Court originally heard the case in the last term, but delayed issuing a decision and added the case to this term for another round of briefing and additional oral argument.
Importantly, today’s ruling does not hold that Section 2 of the VRA is unconstitutional, though Justice Kagan’s dissent notes that the decision “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”
Read today’s ruling here.
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Democracy Forward Foundation is a national legal organization that advances democracy and social progress through litigation, policy, public education, and regulatory engagement. For more information, please visit www.democracyforward.org.
