A Landmark Supreme Court Ruling on Voting Rights
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dealt what may be a final blow to the landmark Voting Rights Act in a ruling that will supercharge the already partisan battle to control the country's election maps. Today, Adam Liptak on the legal logic of the ruling and Nick Corasaniti on how the decision will reshape American democracy.
It's Thursday, April 30th. Adam, this was a very big ruling on a very big piece of our history.
Yeah, the Supreme Court did further and, in a sense, final damage to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, probably the greatest legislative achievement of the civil rights movement, which was meant to protect minority voting power. So it was meant to stop Southern officials from using all kinds of methods, from violence to poll taxes to literacy tests to grandfather clauses, to keep individual Black voters from the voting booth. But it also meant to ensure that minority voters as a group had the collective power, or at least the opportunity, to elect candidates of their choice.
Right. At the time, President Johnson called it a triumph for freedom.
That's right. And it worked. Voter registration and voter turnout numbers in Southern states went from single digits for minority voters to sometimes achieving levels higher than those of white voters. But this gave rise to an attack from the right and from Republicans because, you know, frankly, protecting minority voters often meant protecting Democratic voters because there's a high degree of correlation between the two.
So tell us how that pressure from the right brings us to yesterday's ruling.
So in response to challenges from conservatives, the Supreme Court on Wednesday issued the third in a trilogy of decisions that have collectively hollowed out and rendered the Voting Rights Act toothless. The first one in 2013 cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act, which had required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before they changed voting practices. The second one in 2021 made it all but impossible to sue under the Voting Rights Act for so-called vote denial claims, claims that election administrators had made it harder to vote by, say, instituting voter ID. And then this third and last decision on Wednesday took aim at the remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act, which tried to protect minority voting power when it would be diluted so that minority voters could not have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
Just remind us of the specifics of the case that was decided on Wednesday, this third in this trilogy, and what specifically was at issue in it?
So the question in the case was whether Louisiana could have two majority-minority voting districts. Louisiana has six congressional districts. And not long ago, the state redrew its maps so that Black voters were the majority in two districts rather than just one. Louisiana is about a third Black. So if you just do the math, two sounds about right. But the court said that taking account of race in that way was unlawful.
Creating a second congressional district in which Black voters were the majority, the court found, was unlawful.
That's right. So in the past, the Voting Rights Act would have protected these districts because the understanding of the Voting Rights Act for decades and decades was that it was meant not only to make sure that an individual voter would have the right to vote, but that this community of voters, that minority voters as a collective, would have the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. But on Wednesday, by a 6-3 vote, the court's Republican appointees in the majority, the Democratic appointees in dissent, the court installed a new test, one that made it very hard to take race into account in drawing voting districts.
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