Six right-wing Supreme Court justices just required that elections in Alabama be carried out using plainly racist maps designed to eliminate a Black-majority congressional district. It was an extraordinary move in the wake of the Court’s already extraordinary decision to effectively bury the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The racially discriminatory intent of the Alabama map was so clear that a previous three-judge panel — consisting of two Trump appointees and one Reagan appointee — had found that the maps intentionally discriminated against African-Americans.
The decision comes amid an unprecedented redistricting frenzy by Republicans that’s likely to eliminate nearly all Black congressional representatives from Southern states.
The hunt was unleashed by a Supreme Court decision that rendered the Voting Rights Act toothless to protect Black voting rights. The constitutional “logic” behind the decision in Louisiana v. Callais is worth exploring because it reveals the de facto white supremacy behind conservative demands that the government act in a “color-blind” manner.
In Callais, the six right-wing justices held that efforts to protect Black voters from being gerrymandered into powerlessness represented “discrimination” on the basis of race — and that African-American plaintiffs seeking to protect their representation have a “‘special’ burden to overcome.”
To understand the “special burden,” let’s look back at history.
The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1870, prohibits states from abridging the right to vote on account of race. But for nearly a century, the former Confederate states prevented Black people from voting — through legal tricks of every kind, open violence, and economic intimidation.
The long civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s reached its culmination in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law recalled the Fifteenth Amendment to life by giving federal courts broad and flexible authority to protect African-American voting rights. It prohibits states from imposing any electoral “practice or procedure” that “results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.”
The Voting Rights Act focuses on results, precisely because those who oppose Black voting rights rarely admit their purpose out loud. The law specifically bars practices that give minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate . . . to elect representatives of their choice.”
Gerrymandering obviously violates this. So for decades, federal courts applied this provision to protect African-American voters from racial gerrymandering. Louisiana v. Callais reversed that.
Instead, the right-wingers relied on the court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which unleashed states to engage in unlimited partisan gerrymandering.
Because Black voters tend to support Democrats, the Court allowed Republicans to carry out racial gerrymandering as partisan gerrymandering. It forces African-American voters to prove that racism was the sole reason for districting that denies African-American voters an opportunity to select representatives of their choice.
By approving gerrymandering when a discriminatory reason is accompanied by the desire to advance partisan interests, the Court privileged the desire of a white majority to unfairly magnify its political power through gerrymandering over fairness to voters of color.
“Courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim,” the Court held, so an African-American plaintiff must “disentangle race from politics.” But partisan advantage cannot be deemed “race-neutral” when the very identity of the political party seeking advantage rests on racial ideology.
Following the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, white segregationist voters fled to the GOP, drawn by Republican support for resistance to integration. The GOP’s stance also found a sympathetic audience among Northern whites, who often fought to preserve de facto segregation and white advantages.
The modern Republican Party has been constructed on white resistance to integration and opposition to African-American rights. So when Republican politicians attack African-American political participation, the attacks advance GOP partisan interests by activating racial prejudice.
In a multiracial democracy with a history of white racial oppression, there is an obvious need to ensure that voters of color get a meaningful voice in the political process. Except to white nationalists and their allies.
The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it.
