The US Supreme Court voted 6-3 to destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act by dismantling a key piece of the 61-year-old law by allowing gerrymandering against Black people for political reasons not explicitly racial reasons, which are actually one in the same. reports The Nation:
In Louisiana v. Callais, the court ruled, 6–3, that the Voting Rights Act cannot be used to protect against the limiting of minority political power through gerrymandering. The ruling effectively ends the VRA, and with it the all too brief era of multiracial democracy in America.
The nuts and bolts of the decision are fairly straightforward. Louisiana has six congressional districts, and about a third of its population is Black. Mathematically, that means Louisiana should have two majority-minority congressional districts, but its 2020 redistricting allowed for only one.
The state was sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and forced to draw a map with two Black districts. It did. Then white people sued, arguing that they were somehow constitutionally entitled to congressional overrepresentation, and that the two majority-minority districts discriminated against their white-bred interests.
In Callais, the Supreme Court ruled for the white people. It holds that the Voting Rights Act cannot be used to force Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority district.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, makes two key points:
States cannot use race as a factor in districting even when those states are trying to prevent the disenfranchisement of nonwhite minorities.
The Voting Rights Act only protects against intentional discrimination.
What this means in reality is that white people can gerrymander away Black political power, just like they did in the old days, as long as they say they’re only trying to take away Democratic political power. It means that even if you can show that the gerrymander was obviously targeted to dilute the Black vote and not the “Democratic” vote (as was the case in Louisiana, where neighborhoods full of white Democrats were left untouched but neighborhoods full of Black people were chopped up) it doesn’t matter unless the white gerrymanderers say something like, “I drew this map because I hate Negroes” or some other similarly vile statement bold enough to get Alito excited. It means that the Voting Rights Act is effectively dead.
(Sources: The Nation, The Guardian)