On Thursday the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, ruled the Voting Rights Act still acts as a guard against racial gerrymandering claims in this country. Make no mistake, this is big. The Supreme Court halted its steady march toward eviscerating protections for voters.
The Supreme Court is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. Roberts does not want to be the captain of the U.S. Supreme Court Titanic, presiding over the Supreme Court that utterly loses the faith of Americans. That may be why Roberts, joined by his conservative colleague Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the three liberal justices on the bench, rejected Alabama’s attempts at whittling away at what is left of our country’s watershed voting rights law.
The court made good on the promise that Section 2 still acts as a guardrail against lawmakers who attempt to dilute minority voting rights.
In 2013, the court famously trashed half of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The court essentially told us not to worry because the other half of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, remained. On Thursday, the court made good on the promise that Section 2 still acts as a guardrail against lawmakers who attempt to dilute minority voting rights.
Section 2 prohibits district lines that dilute minority voting power. And it does. At least in a case like the court tackled today, which, as Justice Elena Kagan noted in oral arguments, is “kind of a slam dunk.”
In 2021, Alabama’s GOP-dominated legislature drew district lines for their seven congressional seats. District lines can lead to vote dilution by both “packing” and “cracking” minority voters. Packing refers to the process of putting minority voters in one district, so they cannot exercise their voting power in other districts. Imagine lawmakers draw district lines that put 80%of the members of a minority group into one district. That’s packing. Cracking, a complementary process, refers to the process of fanning minority voters…
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