The U.S. Supreme Court weakened but did not eliminate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday, making it harder to bring voter discrimination claims against electoral maps while stopping short of a widely anticipated full strikedown.
The ruling will likely help Texas in its yearslong litigation over the electoral maps lawmakers drew in 2021, and opens the door to the state creating even more aggressively partisan maps going forward.
The 6-3 decision narrows how courts may interpret Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the seminal civil rights legislation signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. This provision, seen as the cornerstone of the law, outlaws practices denying or abridging the right of any citizen to vote based on their race, including political maps that dilute the electoral power of voters of color.
The upshot of Wednesday’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais is that plaintiffs will have to provide stronger proof to show that a state or county intentionally discriminated against voters of color. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said the four-prong test used to assess whether a state has diluted the vote for people of color needed to be updated for modern times.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination,” Alito wrote. He also noted that the court’s 2019 decision to allow partisan gerrymandering “creates an incentive” for litigants to repackage partisan claims under the guise of race-based challenges.
While Wednesday’s ruling did not eliminate Section 2 entirely, Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent said it “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter” that will “eliminate the lion’s share” of claims brought under that part of the Voting Rights Act.
“The Callais requirements have thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction,” Kagan wrote. “Under cover of ‘updat[ing]’ and ‘realign[ing]’ this greatest of statutes, the majority makes a nullity of Section 2 and threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”
Texas has had at least one of its political maps blocked under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act every decade since it went into effect. With this limitation narrowed significantly by the court, the state could push to reconsider its current congressional, state House and Senate, and State Board of Education maps, a possibility some Republicans have already teased. The maps have been under litigation since they went into effect in 2021.
The governor of Mississippi has said he would call a special session to rapidly redraw the state’s voting maps if the court struck down Section 2. Other states are expected to follow suit, especially amid the redistricting arms race Texas kicked off last summer. But with Texas’ unusually early primaries already in the rearview mirror, Lone Star lawmakers may wait until the next regular session begins in January to embark on any redraws.
The high court’s decision set off a wave of outrage from Democrats. Texas House Democratic Caucus chair Gene Wu, D-Houston, said the ruling gave state legislatures a “permission slip” to crack and pack Black and Latino voters into districts “where their voices won’t matter.”
“According to this Court, a century of voter suppression in places like Texas and Louisiana is ancient history, no longer relevant to lawmaking and redistricting today,” Wu said.
Mike Smith, the president of House Majority PAC — House Democrats’ top super PAC — said the ruling was a “green light to rig House elections.”
“With Democrats on track to retake the majority in November, Republicans and their allies on the Court are scrambling to protect the rich and powerful instead of lowering costs and making life more affordable for American families,” Smith said.
Brandon Herrera, the Republican nominee for Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, echoed the sentiment that the ruling will “likely have MAJOR implications for the midterms,” as he wrote on social media.
“Democrats are going to have to scramble to protect seats they thought were safe, kneecapping the momentum they thought they had to take the House,” Herrera said.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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