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SCOTUS to Hear GOP Voting Rights Case 10/14 06:12
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Republican attack on a core provision of the Voting
Rights Act that is designed to protect racial minorities comes to the Supreme
Court this week, more than a decade after the justices knocked out another
pillar of the 60-year-old law.
In arguments Wednesday, lawyers for Louisiana and the Trump administration
will try to persuade the justices to wipe away the state's second majority
Black congressional district and make it much harder, if not impossible, to
take account of race in redistricting.
"Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,"
Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill wrote in the state's Supreme Court
filing.
A mid-decade battle over congressional redistricting already is playing out
across the nation, after President Donald Trump began urging Texas and other
Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines to make it easier for the
GOP to hold its narrow majority in the House of Representatives. A ruling for
Louisiana could intensify that effort and spill over to state legislative and
local districts.
The conservative-dominated court, which just two years ago ended affirmative
action in college admissions, could be receptive. At the center of the legal
fight is Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long had the landmark civil rights
law in his sights, from his time as a young lawyer in the Reagan-era Justice
Department to his current job.
"It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race," Roberts wrote in a
dissenting opinion in 2006 in his first major voting rights case as chief
justice.
In 2013, Roberts wrote for the majority in gutting the landmark law's
requirement that states and local governments with a history of discrimination,
mostly in the South, get approval before making any election-related changes.
"Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is
too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that
problem speaks to current conditions," Roberts wrote.
The challenged provision relies on current conditions
Challenges under the provision known as Section 2 of the voting rights law
must be able to show current racially polarized voting and an inability of
minority populations to elect candidates of their choosing, among other factors.
"Race is still very much a factor in current voting patterns in the state of
Louisiana. It's true in many places in the country," said Sarah Brannon, deputy
director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project.
The Louisiana case got to this point only after Black voters and civil
rights groups sued and won lower court rulings striking down the first
congressional map drawn by the state's GOP-controlled Legislature after the
2020 census. That map created just one Black majority district among six House
seats in a state that is one-third Black.
Louisiana appealed to the Supreme Court but eventually added a second
majority Black district after the justices' 5-4 ruling in 2023 that found a
likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over Alabama's
congressional map.
Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal
colleagues in the Alabama outcome. Roberts rejected what he described as
"Alabama's attempt to remake our section 2 jurisprudence anew."
That might have settled things, but a group of white voters complained that
race, not politics, was the predominant factor driving the new Louisiana map. A
three-judge court agreed, leading to the current high court case.
Instead of deciding the case in June, the justices asked the parties to
answer a potentially big question: "Whether the state's intentional creation of
a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or
Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution."
Those amendments, adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War, were intended
to bring about political equality for Black Americans and gave Congress the
authority to take all necessary steps. Nearly a century later, Congress passed
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, called the crown jewel of the civil rights era,
to finally put an end to persistent efforts to prevent Black people from voting
in the former states of the Confederacy.
A second round of arguments is rare at the Supreme Court
The call for new arguments sometimes presages a major change by the high
court. The Citizens United decision in 2010 that led to dramatic increases in
independent spending in U.S. elections came after it was argued a second time.
"It does feel to me a little bit like Citizens United in that, if you recall
the way Citizens United unfolded, it was initially a narrow First Amendment
challenge," said Donald Verrilli, who served as the Obama administration's top
Supreme Court lawyer and defended the voting rights law in the 2013 case.
Among the possible outcomes in the Louisiana case, Verrilli said, is one in
which a majority holds that the need for courts to step into redistricting
cases, absent intentional discrimination, has essentially expired. Kavanaugh
raised the issue briefly two years ago.
The Supreme Court has separately washed its hands of partisan gerrymandering
claims, in a 2019 opinion that also was written by Roberts. Restricting or
eliminating most claims of racial discrimination in federal courts would give
state legislatures wide latitude to draw districts, subject only to state
constitutional limits.
A shift of just one vote from the Alabama case would flip the outcome.
With the call for new arguments, Louisiana changed its position and is no
longer defending its map.
The Trump administration joined on Louisiana's side. The Justice Department
had previously defended the voting rights law under administrations of both
major political parties.
Rep. Cleo Fields has been here before
For four years in the 1990s, Louisiana had a second Black majority district
until courts struck it down because it relied too heavily on race. Fields, then
a rising star in the state's Democratic politics, twice won election. He didn't
run again when a new map was put in place and reverted to just one majority
Black district in the state.
Fields is one of the two Black Democrats who won election to Congress last
year in newly drawn districts in Alabama and Louisiana.
He again represents the challenged district, described in March by Roberts
as "a snake that runs from one end of the state to the other," picking up Black
residents along the way.
If that's so, civil rights lawyer Stuart Naifeh told Roberts, it's because
of slavery, Jim Crow laws and the persistent lack of economic opportunity for
Black Louisianans.
Fields said the court's earlier ruling that eliminated federal review of
potentially discriminatory voting laws has left few options to protect racial
minorities, making the preservation of Section 2 all the more important.
They would never win election to Congress, he said, "but for the Voting
Rights Act and but for creating majority minority districts."
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