"My expectations are that every southern state will redraw their districts," said voting rights correspondent Ari Berman, after this week's historic gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dealt a death blow to the country’s most important civil rights legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the law that defeated Jim Crow.
For 100 years, from 1865 to 1965, Black people were systematically and actively excluded from participation in American democracy through racial violence, but more commonly through race-neutral tricks like poll taxes and grandfather clauses. Governments across the country also used redistricting to dilute the Black vote without ever having to talk about race explicitly.
That’s what Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, enacted federally, went after: The slippery tricks deployed to destroy the political power of Black folks and other people of color—especially in the South.
And the Supreme Court just took us right back to that time.
The majority opinion in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, struck down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana. In so doing, the court rendered Section 2 of the VRA basically useless, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.
As soon as this decision dropped, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to. My colleagues Ari Berman and Pema Levy are two of the sharpest minds reporting on voting rights and the Supreme Court in the country. And they were clear: This is bad. “Today is so heartbreaking because we’ve been writing about this for so long,” Pema told me. “And this just really feels like the final nail in the coffin.”
“When we weaken the Voting Rights Act, we don’t just weaken one law,” Ari agreed, “we weaken the very fabric of American democracy.”
The two went on to explain the staggering potential costs of the decision. “Who needs poll taxes and literacy tests if you have partisan free for all?” Pema explained. “If your partisan designs trump everyone else’s rights, then you can just, under the guise of partisan gerrymandering, eliminate the voting rights of minority voters simply because they don’t vote for your party. It is absolutely a Jim Crow tool now.”
“We could see the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction,” Ari warned. “We could lose a third of the Congressional Black Caucus.”
Our sobering conversation about the Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act, and the future of multiracial democracy is above. I got a lot out of this, and I hope you do too.
