What a rogue court….
And they don't want you to notice.
www.motherjones.com
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to hide what you are doing in Washington, announce it on a Friday evening in the heat of August. Better yet, in place of clarity, reference some pages in another document, so that people have to track that down and read it in order to grasp what you are telling them.
That is precisely what the Supreme Court did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: The Republican-appointed justices have decided it is time to fully destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Republicans argue equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters.
Sixty years ago, the Voting Rights Act ended the Jim Crow regime and transformed the country, finally, into a multiracial democracy—albeit an imperfect one. But, with the court’s quiet announcement it would return to a paused case, the justices are now preparing to take us back to a time when elected officials at all levels of government were white, and the rights of minorities were trampled. The court’s eventual decision will impact how political maps are drawn, and will certainly hasten the precipitous decline of American democracy.
In its most recent term, the justices heard oral arguments in a redistricting case out of Louisiana. The state’s population is one-third Black, but after the 2020 census, the Louisiana legislature drew a Congressional map for its six seats with just one majority-Black district. After two courts found that this map violated the Voting Rights Act’s mandate that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, the legislature drew a new map with two Black-majority districts. That should have been the end of the saga, but a group of non-Black voters sued, arguing that the consideration of race in creating a second minority-majority district violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
It’s a perverse argument. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce the vision of equality enacted that animated the 14th and 15th Amendments. Indeed, the VRA was enacted under Congress’ express authority to use legislation to enforce the equal protection and voting rights guarantees of the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Now, Republican lawyers are attacking the law, arguing that equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters. The amendments that ushered in a
Second Founding of political equality are being reinterpreted to resurrect white supremacy.
Under the Roberts Court, equal protection has become a
sword to wield against programs, policies, and laws intended to create an equal system. The lingering Louisiana case now presents the Republican justices an opportunity to hollow out one of the few remaining protections of the VRA, the requirement of minority-majority districts, under this twisted reasoning.
Last term, rather than decide the case, the court punted on its final day of opinions in June. Then, on Friday night, it
announced it would rehear the case in the coming term. This time, the court wants the parties to submit briefs on “Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
The court’s Friday order doesn’t mention the VRA. For that, you have to follow the breadcrumbs it leaves by referring to three pages from the
brief of the non-Black voters. In those pages, the litigants argue using race as a factor in drawing district maps under the VRA is unconstitutional, and that the time has come for the court to eliminate the use of race in political-map drawing. The court is accepting this invitation.
www.deseret.com
