How far did the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act decision go?

The Supreme Court’s invalidation of Louisiana’s congressional map has triggered a swirling debate about just how fundamentally the justices altered the Voting Rights Act landscape.

Even the justices themselves disagree. The conservative majority brands it as merely an update. The liberal dissenters say it’s nothing short of demolishing the landmark 1965 law.

It has left states scrambling to make sense of it as they consider racing to redraw their maps in advance of this year’s midterm elections.

The changes, explained 

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has enabled groups to force states to draw additional majority-minority districts for decades.

The provision bars voting maps that give a racial minority “less opportunity than other members of the electorate” to elect their preferred candidate.

Wednesday’s decision doesn’t strike down Section 2. It changes the multi-step framework, called the Gingles test, that the Supreme Court established in the 1980s to parse the law’s dense language and decide challenges.

The decision makes it more difficult for minority groups to clear the test in three ways.

First, when a challenger offers a proposed design for a new majority-minority district, it must meet certain requirements.

The challenger can’t consider race while drawing it. Justice Samuel Alito said that would have “no value.” It must also still meet “all the State’s legitimate districting objectives.” The court said that includes state leaders’ political aims, like efforts to keep incumbents within a boundary.

Second, challengers must show the racial patterns can’t be explained by partisanship.

It adds to a series of Supreme Court decisions strengthening requirements that plaintiffs “disentangle” race and politics. For example, Alito said challengers could point to dramatic differences in voting patterns between Black and white Democrats.

“By contrast, simply pointing to inter-party racial polarization proves nothing,” he wrote.

Third, challengers need to focus on intentional discrimination in the present day.

“Discrimination that occurred some time ago, as well as present-day disparities that are characterized as the ongoing ‘effects of societal discrimination,’ are entitled to much less weight,” Alito wrote.

Conservatives see it as restoring Voting Rights Act

The conservative majority insisted they aren’t gutting Section 2 or abandoning the test. Instead, they called it an “update.”

Alito said the framework needed changes to reflect the past 40 years of American life, like vast social change in the South, the increased use of computers in mapmaking and the court’s 2019 decision that federal judges can’t strike down maps as partisan gerrymanders.

“In light of these significant developments, it is appropriate to update the Gingles framework and realign it with the text of [Section 2] and constitutional principles,” Alito explained.

It handed a win to conservatives who’ve argued lower court judges were prompting states to unconstitutionally consider race in forcing more minority-majority districts. They view the decision as restoring the Voting Rights Act to its proper form.

“To hear the critics tell it, the Supreme Court on Wednesday gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and made it harder for racial minorities to vote. It did no such thing,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board began its response to the decision.

The decision was especially felt in Florida, where Republicans were already moving on Wednesday to pass a new congressional map boosting the party’s chances in this year’s midterms.

“Gone are the days of snake-shaped districts,” said Florida GOP Chairman Evan Power.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R), whose state was recently pushed to add a second-majority Black congressional district under the Voting Rights Act, similarly celebrated the ruling as a restoration.

“The Supreme Court has now made clear that you cannot assume race and politics are the same thing, you have to actually show they’re separate,” Marshall said.

The decision even led President Trump to compliment the court, a shift from his weeks of public attacks over the justices’ decision striking down his emergency tariffs.

Trump called it a “BIG WIN” that “returns the Voting Rights Act to its Original Intent.”

Liberals see it as demolishing Voting Rights Act

To the three liberal justices in dissent, it’s no update. They cast the decision as finishing a judicial project to destroy the Voting Rights Act.

“Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

She predicted the decision will make Section 2 lawsuits nearly impossible. Connecting it to the court’s 2013 decision striking down a separate part of the Voting Rights Act, she called Wednesday’s a “now-completed demolition” of the 1965 law.

“Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” Kagan said.

It’s a sentiment echoed in the days since by groups that advocated to keep the Voting Rights Act framework intact.

“Unfortunately, we are talking about rolling back to an era of Jim Crow, and I don’t believe I’m overstating that,” Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project, said during a Thursday appearance on CNN.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said the law was “largely gone,” telling reporters the decision was “designed to undermine the ability of communities of color all across this country to elect their candidate of choice.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill) said the court had “turned its back on the promise of an equal right to vote.”

Onetime Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said the court had lied to America.

“With this decision, it’s open season — once again — on Black and brown voters at the ballot box,” Abrams wrote in an op-ed for MS NOW .

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