Today the United States Supreme Court issued an opinion that will upend the Voting Rights Act.

With their ruling on Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court has just delt what will be one of the final blows destroying the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. It is not a stretch to call the VRA one of the most transformative laws ever to pass in the United States. The result of decades of advocacy, the VRA was aimed at addressing many of the methods of discrimination, including violence, used to block people of color, especially Black Americans, from voting across the South.

Essentially, the court has determined that addressing racial gerrymandering aimed against minority groups by elected officials when redrawing political lines is racial discrimination against racial majority groups. It is a horrible logical loop that that will perpetuate discriminatory practices in our elections and result in a drop in the racial diversity of elected bodies from Congress down.

What the Voting Rights Act did

Provisions in the VRA fell into two major buckets. There were laws geared toward preventing voting rights violations by states with a history of racial discrimination requiring such states to receive federal approval before implementing new election laws. These provisions were halted by the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court Ruling of 2013.

The second major bucket is found primarily in Section 2 of the VRA, which applies to all states and localities:

“No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

The VRA and Gerrymandering

One of the many methods of racial discrimination in voting has been to dilute the political power of people of color.  A common redistricting technique used to dilute minority voting strength is called “cracking.” When drawing voting districts, officials would draw Black, Hispanic, and other communities of color into multiple districts, instead of one. This practice ensured a White candidate would win, regardless of the racial makeup of the area.

In 1986, in response to a lawsuit brought by Black voters against the state of North Carolina for cracking their voting power, Thornburg v. Gingles, the Supreme Court established three criteria to assess the discriminatory effects of redistricting under Section 2 of the VRA, which says the totality of circumstances should be looked at when making an analysis.

1. The minority group must be large and compact enough that they could be drawn into a single district.

2. The minority group votes similarly.

3. The White majority votes as a bloc and would typically not vote for the preferred candidate of the minority group.  

Decades later, in 2009, the Supreme Court added that to qualify under the geographic compactness criteria, a racial minority group would need to make up more than 50% of the population.

Louisiana’s Redistricting Fight

Fast forward to 2022, when, in response to Louisiana’s new congressional maps, the state’s NAACP sued the state, arguing that Black Louisianans’ rights had been violated under Section 2 of the VRA. They argued this because they made up a third of the state’s population but were only represented in one of the six newly drawn congressional districts. The state then redrew the congressional districts with two Black majority districts to avoid adopting a court-ordered map. But then, in response to that map, a group of Louisiana voters who identified as “non-African American” sued the state over the new map, arguing it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause and was illegal, racial gerrymandering.

Today, in the Louisiana v. Callais case, the majority of the Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs that the map was illegal racial gerrymandering and ruled the map invalid. Justice Samual Alito reading the majority opinion said “Correctly understood, Section 2 does not impose liability at odds with the Constitution, and it should not have imposed liability on Louisiana for its 2022 map.” “Compliance with Section 2 thus could not justify the State’s use of race-based redistricting here.”

What happens now?

In all likelihood, the United States House of Representatives will look very different because of Louisiana v. Callais. NPR reports that the Congressional Black Caucus could lose 30% of its members and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus could lose 11% of its members because of the ruling. But Congress will not be the only level of government impacted. Any representative body that is districted, including school boards and city councils, will be affected, almost certainly decreasing the number of people of color serving in local governments in certain parts of the country. The impact of this will be harmful in numerous, devastating ways, not the least of which will be many Black and Brown people across the country feeling even more deeply disenfranchised and disconnected from the government. The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callias takes us backwards, no longer a government striving to be for the people, by the people.

What Remains of Section 2 of the VRA

And while the opinion in Louisiana v. Callais is a terrible blow against the VRA, another threat is looming. Right here in Arkansas, the state NAACP sued over Arkansas’s congressional map that divides Central Arkansas into three congressional districts. In that case, a judge ruled that private citizens do not have the right to sue under section 2 of the VRA, only the Justice Department can. After the ruling in Arkansas, federal judges ruled similarly in other states. And the Supreme Court is about to make the final decision on a case out of North Dakota on this issue.

What will it mean if the court decides private citizens can no longer sue for a violation of their rights under the VRA? The Justice Department would have sole discretion in determining if a violation occurred and whether a suit should be brought, leaving private citizens at the mercy and political whims of government officials. And basically, it will mean the end of the Voting Rights Act, which has protected and preserved Americans’ right to vote for six decades.