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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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.
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Chapter 2: What was the Supreme Court's ruling on Louisiana's voting map?
So the court says the Voting Rights Act only kicks in if lawmakers had intended to discriminate against minority voters. Whatever the effect of, whatever the results of the map are, only intentional racial discrimination, which is very hard to prove, what was in the lawmakers' heads counts.
So what the court does on Wednesday is it lays out a new legal criteria for when it is not okay to eliminate a, for example, black majority congressional district, which the VRA in the past was seen as protecting.
And that new criteria is that the people eliminating the district would have to stand up on a stage somewhere pretty much and say, we're getting rid of this district in order to hurt black voters. They'd have to be explicit in their desire to discriminate. And unless they do that, then such a district with a black majority can be wiped off the map.
That's right. So a lawmaker could say, and maybe truthfully say, that, hey, I don't mean to discriminate against black people. I mean to discriminate against Democrats, and I'm allowed to do that. Partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court said in another case, is not subject to review in the federal courts. And what this means is a practical matter.
is that districts drawn to ensure that minority voters have the power to elect the candidates they want are now in peril across the country.
Adam, what is the rationale from the conservative justices who issued this ruling for doing so? Because it feels related to a larger body of Supreme Court rulings that we've talked to you about over the last several years from the Roberts Court, including, of course, the affirmative action ruling that have challenged government intervention when it comes to race.
So as a general matter, quite right, Michael. This court, the conservative majority on this court, is uniformly hostile to government decision-making that takes account of race. It says the Constitution is colorblind, and you shouldn't be sorting people based on their race. And then more specifically, in the context of the Voting Rights Act, the majority says that things have changed.
The Voting Rights Act had a role to play back then, but no longer. And Justice Alito says as much in his majority opinion.
He says, at the time of the act's passage, the nation had faced nearly a century of entrenched racial discrimination in voting, an insidious and pervasive evil, which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution. But the Voting Rights Act led to great strides in the ensuing decades.
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Chapter 3: How does this ruling affect the Voting Rights Act?
But as between the two of them, I would think that Justice Kagan has the better of the argument. Because? The history in this area is these three decisions now. The first two were quite consequential, and the second one in particular basically shut down a way to try to challenge restrictions on voting by minority voters. So it stands to reason that
that this latest installment in the court's deconstruction of the Voting Rights Act will have a considerable impact in the short term, in the election we're about to face, and certainly in years to come.
Adam, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. After the break, my colleague Nick Corasaniti on what the impact of this ruling will look like on American politics. We'll be right back.
My name's Hannah Dreyer. I'm an investigative reporter at The New York Times. So much of my process is challenging my own assumptions and trying to uncover new information that often goes against what I thought I would find. All of my reporting comes from going out, seeing something, and realizing, oh, that's actually the story.
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Nick, welcome back to The Daily.
Thanks for having me.
We now quite clearly understand from Adam Liptak that because of the Supreme Court ruling, the Voting Rights Act's protection of minority election districts across the country has been deeply weakened.
And you've spent years reporting on the question of voting rights and gerrymandering, and you've been anticipating this ruling because we are in the middle of a fierce nationwide redistricting battle already. So... When the rubber of this ruling meets the road, in your estimation, what are going to be the practical implications of it starting right now in this election year?
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Chapter 4: What historical context led to this Supreme Court decision?
A pretty big undertaking.
Yeah.
Yeah, and there's also the cartographical challenge, to use a multi-syllable word there, where when a district is in the corner of a state, it's a lot harder to carve up than if it were in the middle, and you could split it apart like a piece of pie. So there are both calendar challenges. geographical challenges and time challenges in Tennessee. Right.
But Republicans also have a very immediate use of this ruling when it comes to new maps in the midterms, and that's in Florida. Now, earlier this week, Governor Ron DeSantis introduced a new map, and it's in a very aggressive gerrymander. It would eliminate four of the eight Democratic districts currently in the state.
Half? Wow.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a significant redrawing of the state's political divisions. Now, in justifying drawing new maps, Governor DeSantis had pointed to this looming decision before the court as a reason that the state needed to redraw its maps ahead of the midterms.
He anticipated that the ruling would go essentially Republicans' way.
Exactly. And so today, Republicans in the state legislature passed these new maps.
Wow.
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