Mississippi’s Moment

The likely prospect of Mississippi electing a black Senator for the first time since Reconstruction bolsters the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence over voting rights. The election outcome implies a rebuke, too, of the strident rhetoric over the high court’s conservative majority having “gutted” the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These charges arose in, say, 2013 after Shelby County v. Holder and earlier this year after the Louisiana v. Callais decision.Yet even the prospective election of a black Democratic prosecutor, Scott Colom, to the Senate from the Magnolia State reflects America’s and Mississippi’s progress toward racial equality and a colorblind standard in voting. This can be attributed in part to the insistence of the Supreme Court’s conservatives to follow the plain meaning of federal laws and the Constitution rather than yield to calls by liberal activists to perpetuate racial preferences. It’s not our intention here to overstate Mr. Colom’s chances. The race has not been called by state officials or, say, the Associated Press. Yet with 97 percent of the ballots counted as of Monday morning, Mr. Colom is leading his Republican opponent, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, by some 2,500 votes. Tuesday is the deadline for the state to receive absentee ballots and for counting provisional ballots. The state has until Friday to certify the tally.Even if Ms. Hyde-Smith comes from behind to hold her seat, though, Mr. Colom’s performance belies the alarmist talk from the left over voting rights and race, as Howard Husock writes in our pages. In Callais, the Nine held that Louisiana was not required to draw voting maps that created a de facto quota system for minority representation in the state. Viewed more broadly, the ruling backed the ideal that voting maps should be drawn on colorblind grounds.A legal analyst at Bloomberg News, June Grasso, called Callais “Armageddon for voting rights.” Axios fretted that the ruling “narrows” the Voting Rights Act. The Brennan Center for Justice lamented that after Callais, “Minority voters will now be left with a diminished voice in American politics, rolling back half a century of steady progress toward racial equality in voting practices.” What to make, then, of Mr. Colom’s performance at the polls?The left’s reaction to Shelby County was even more acerbic. The Nine held that the Voting Rights Act’s so-called pre-clearance requirements breached the sovereignty of the states. This federal oversight meant that states with a history of racial discrimination had to get advance approval from the Justice Department to, say, redraw a voting district or move a polling place. Such rules may have been needed in 1965, the Nine held, but not in the 21st century.Progress toward racial equality since the Act’s passage, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority in Shelby County, was seen in that “African-American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by” the rules, “with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent.” In short, the facts dictated that preclearance oversight was no longer needed. That failed to prevent claims that the Act had been vitiated.“I think part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions,” Justice Kagan averred recently in remarks reflecting on how the high court’s recent rulings would bear on the midterm voting. In the end, though, the ballots cast in Mississippi and across the nation showed that the voters themselves, and not unelected federal judges, are the best arbiters of what constitutes fairness.

Mississippi’s Moment

Mississippi’s Moment

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