Voting rights protections in the United States face a new legal constraint after the Supreme Court new statement that narrowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a closely watched ruling.
It comes as the US Supreme Court on Wednesday undermined a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—raising the bar for racial minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark civil rights law—in a victory for Louisiana Republicans and President Donald Trump’s administration.
Supreme Court ruling:
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling powered by the court’s conservative members, upheld a lower court’s decision blocking an electoral map that had given the state a second Black-majority ‌congressional district.
The lower court had found that the map was guided too much by racial considerations in violation of the constitutional promise of equal protection under the law.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The ruling was authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by his five fellow conservative justices. The three liberal justices dissented.
Louisiana case:
The Louisiana case involved a central element of the Voting Rights Act. The law’s Section 2 was enacted by Congress to prohibit electoral maps that would result in diluting the clout of minority voters, even without direct proof of racist intent.
Alito wrote that the focus of Section 2 must now be to enforce the Constitution’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination under the 15th Amendment.
“Only when understood this way does Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act properly fit within Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment enforcement power,” Alito wrote.
Interpreting Section 2 to “outlaw a map solely because it fails to provide a sufficient number of majority-minority districts would create a right that the amendment does not protect,” Alito added.
Legal analysts said before the ruling was issued that a decision undercutting Section 2 could benefit Republican candidates.
The ruling was issued amid a battle unfolding in Republican-governed and Democratic-led states around the country involving the redrawing of electoral maps to change the composition of congressional districts for partisan advantage ahead of the November congressional elections.
US Voting Rights Act:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark U.S. law created to prevent racial discrimination in voting.
It especially targets practices that could block minority voters from participating equally in elections.
Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent joined by the two other liberal justices, said that the ruling will have major consequences.
“Under the court’s new view of Section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”
“Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic,” Kagan said.
“The majority claims only to be ‘updating’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks,” Kagan added.
Redistricting:
The Trump administration also backed ‌the challenge made in the Louisiana case to the Voting Rights Act, advocating for raising the bar for proving a Section 2 violation.
Louisiana, where Black people make up roughly a third of the population, has six U.S. House of Representatives districts—Black voters tend to support Democratic candidates.
In a process called redistricting, the boundaries of legislative districts across the United States are reconfigured to reflect population changes as measured by the national census conducted every 10 years.Â
Notably, this redistricting typically has been carried out by state legislatures once per decade.
