Supreme Court redistricting fight sounds the death knell for Voting Rights Act

[In It to Win It]

https://www.courthousenews.com/supreme-court-redistricting-fight-sounds-the-death-knell-for-voting-rights-act/

WASHINGTON (CN) — The crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement faces extinction at the Supreme Court next week as the justices consider whether a safeguard against racial discrimination is unconstitutional.

The justices will hear oral arguments Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais, which asks whether adding a second majority-Black district to the state’s voting maps violated the 14th and 15th Amendments. But the high court’s decision stands to ripple across the nation, impacting redistricting nationwide.

“This is about more than lines on a map — it could decide whether millions of Black, Latino and other voters of color still have a voice in our representative democracy,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action.

For decades, the Roberts court has chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, leaving Section 2, which prohibits discriminatory vote dilution, as one of its last remaining enforceable provisions. Now that too is at risk, setting up the potential for the justices to nullify the landmark law.

“Without the protections of Section 2, there will be very few checks on undoing all that progress that has been made since 1965 and potential backsliding to conditions that we saw prior to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act,” Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, said.

Supreme Court redistricting fight sounds the death knell for Voting Rights Act

@courthousenews.bsky.social
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— Kelsey Reichmann (@kelseyreichmann.bsky.social) 2025-10-10T18:08:22.291Z

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Exhale a little. Marc Elias is personally arguing this case.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. Deadline Legal Blog-The Voting Rights Act is at further risk as the Roberts Court hears Louisiana map appeal

The court will hear oral argument Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could further gut the landmark law that the court has already weakened.

MSNBC: The Voting Rights Act is at further risk as the Roberts Court hears Louisiana map appeal: The court will hear oral argument Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could further gut the landmark law that the court has already weakened. www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...

— (@jwwcan.bsky.social) 2025-10-15T14:10:59.334Z

https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-supreme-louisiana-map-redistricting-rcna237637

While we rightly pay attention to how the Supreme Court is empowering President Donald Trump and his administration, the justices will hold a hearing Wednesday that highlights the Roberts Court’s priorities that predate Trump and will echo long after he leaves office.

Those priorities surface in the appeal, called Callais, with the question lurking in the background of whether the Constitution is “colorblind.” Though it isn’t the direct legal question in the case, it’s a notion that Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican-appointed colleagues have embraced, notably in the Harvard case that gutted affirmative action in 2023. The Callais appeal raises the prospect of the court cutting out the remaining pillar of the landmark Voting Rights Act on similar grounds. The result could shape future U.S. elections and further help Republicans’ electoral prospects......

Colorblindness
Following the Roberts-led court’s hollowing out of another part of the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 Shelby County case, the remaining safeguard implicated by Callais is Section 2, which prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices or procedures.

The parties present opposing views on whether taking race into account when drawing districts can be necessary to realize the law’s promise or is necessarily anathema to the Constitution in 2025.

“Section 2 authorizes race-conscious remedies only where, when, and to the extent required to respond to a ‘regrettable reality’ of ongoing unequal electoral opportunity based on race,” lawyers representing Black voters wrote to the justices ahead of the hearing. Removing that section’s protections in Louisiana “will not end discrimination there or lead to a race-blind society, but it may well lead to a severe decrease in minority representation at all levels of government in many parts of the country,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, lawyers for Louisiana countered that the “invidious classifications underlying race-based redistricting present the last significant battle in defense of our ‘color blind’ Constitution.” They called the battle an “easy” one, citing the court’s statement in the Harvard affirmative action case that eliminating racial discrimination “means eliminating all of it.” The state said that means “no quarter for race-based redistricting.”

I am nervous. I remember Roberts gutting the Voting Rights Act in his Shelby County opinion where Roberts claimed that all racial discrimination had ended and so the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. Deadline Legal Blog-Justice Kavanaugh insists on imposing a made-up time limit on the law and the Constitution

The Trump appointee could cast a pivotal vote in a Louisiana case affecting the future of voting rights in the United States. Republicans stand to benefit.

Justice Kavanaugh insists on imposing a made-up time limit on the law and the Constitution www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...

— Philly Joe (@joehick58.bsky.social) 2025-10-16T00:55:54.580Z

https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/supreme-court-brett-kavanaugh-louisiana-voting-rights-limit-rcna237825

The Supreme Court is on the verge of further limiting voting rights, thanks in part to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s unfounded insistence that considering race can only be legal for a certain amount of time into the future — regardless of what the law and the Constitution say.

The Trump appointee’s misguided approach was on display during a major hearing Wednesday in Washington. It was there that he asked a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund when race-based remedies should end. The question came in the context of the landmark Voting Rights Act and key post-Civil War constitutional amendments guaranteeing equal protection (the 14th) and prohibiting race discrimination in voting (the 15th).

The lawyer, Janai Nelson, said that there shouldn’t be a time limit and that the Voting Rights Act section in question — Section 2 — doesn’t even always require race-based remedies. Section 2 prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices or procedures, and it has become even more important after the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, gutted another provision of the act in 2013......

Kavanaugh previously flagged the made-up time limit issue in a case from Alabama in 2023, when he and Roberts surprisingly formed a 5-4 majority with their Democratic-appointed colleagues to back a Section 2 claim. Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion that said “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” The Trump appointee noted that Alabama “did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.”.....

Whatever one thinks of that as a policy matter, the law and the constitutional amendments at issue don’t have the time limits that the majority appears to wish they did.

And while those justices seem to want to forget the sordid history that made those legal tools necessary, or at least hope they’re no longer needed today, outlawing racial considerations for remedial purposes would also ignore the modern reality. Justice Elena Kagan observed at the hearing that Section 2 lawsuits “ask about current conditions, and they ask whether those current conditions show vote dilution, which is violative of Section 2.” She told the state’s lawyer, Benjamin Aguiñaga, that “what our precedents say and what you’re asking us now to change what our precedents say is that when those things operate currently right as of now and are proved in a courtroom, that — that still there can’t be a race-based remedy.”

“That’s correct, Justice Kagan,” Aguiñaga replied.

The result of curbing Section 2 would be “pretty catastrophic,” Nelson said at the hearing. She said that “any further neutering of Section 2 would resurrect the 15th Amendment as a mere parchment promise.”

The 2013 case was Shelby County where Roberts struck down part of the Voting Rights Act based on his opinion that there was no longer any racial discrimination in the United States. Roberts is a bigoted racist hack who should never have been appointed to the SCOTUS. I fear that the Voting Rights Act is doomed