A Victory for the Spirit of the Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court’s vindication today of colorblind election maps is being met with indignation on the left. “Armageddon for voting rights,” thunders Bloomberg News’ legal analyst, June Grasso. The ruling “narrows” the Voting Rights Act, Axios frets. Such appraisals seem to suggest either disregard for, or ignorance of, the landmark law’s provisions, which enshrine equal treatment for all races when drawing voting maps. That understanding of the law’s language, as the high court holds today, rules out the de facto quotas in congressional districts for which the left has in recent decades been plumping. The law, Justice Samuel Alito writes for the majority, “was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it.” He laments that some court rulings have misinterpreted the law to force states “to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”Louisiana v. Callais arose because of such a misapplication of the Voting Rights Act in the Pelican State. Lawmakers at Baton Rouge had drawn an election map in which but one district of six contained a majority of black residents. Because blacks make up a third of the state, critics averred that the colorblind map was biased and breached the law. The state needed two majority-black districts, a lower court decided. Louisiana appealed to the high court.Today’s ruling affirms that the lower court’s meddling in the drawing of maps led to “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” as Justice Alito puts it. It conforms, too, to the language in the Voting Rights Act. In 1982, the law was amended to clarify that “nothing” in the measure “establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” So the high court ruling is hardly apocalyptic.Yet the apoplexy on the left could be animated less by constitutional concerns than by electoral math. The high court’s defense of colorblind maps, these columns have reported, could upend the midterms and even help preserve the GOP’s control of Congress. That’s because about a dozen Democratic-held districts in the House could potentially be redrawn as a result of the ruling, depending on whether states decide they have enough time.In February the Times had cautioned of catastrophe for the left were the Nine to bar states from drawing “majority-minority districts” that, in the Gray Lady’s telling, “help voters of color elect candidates of their choice.” Many of these districts, the Times added, are now “occupied by Democrats,” but “Republican-led states across the South could try to eliminate” them. The “crucial factor,” the Times reported, would be “when the ruling lands.”After all, the midterm elections have already begun in some states, with partisan primaries held in, say, Illinois and Mississippi. Yet the Callais ruling has come relatively early in the context of the court’s calendar, under which key rulings often emerge in late June or even July. Some eight GOP-led states, including Florida, hold their primaries between May and August, giving them, at least in theory, an option to redraw maps in conformity with Callais.Florida lawmakers are already moving on a remap to ensure that the Sunshine State’s House delegation is chosen via colorblind districts. A narrow focus on the benefit to the GOP, though, would view the high court’s ruling through too partisan a lens. More broadly, the conservative majority’s decision today bolsters the principle of racial equality that is at the heart of the 14th Amendment, and which animated passage in 1965 of the Voting Rights Act.

A Victory for the Spirit of the Voting Rights Act

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