04.30.26

The end of U.S. democracy

Louisianans register to vote after passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Thanks to Jim Crow laws, in 1940 only 897 Black people were registered to vote in the state. By 1976 their numbers neared 400,000. Photo credit: Lee S.Delaune

“First Dobbs. Now Callais,” wrote Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. “Just Mississippi and Louisiana down here saving our country!”

The white governor was referring first, of course, to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that nullified constitutional protection of women’s rights to bodily autonomy and returned abortion law to the states. Within 18 months, half of the states had nearly or entirely banned abortion.

The second case he cites is the 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v Callais, which yesterday demolished the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the law that put an end to a century of Jim Crow law and gave racial minorities a voice in representative government.

SCOTUS has been working hard to end the VRA. Chief Justice Roberts has reportedly wanted to do it since the 1980s. In Shelby County v Holder, in 2013, the Court struck down the section requiring states with histories of racial discrimination to get permission from the federal elections commission before redistricting. Once the section was gone, right away hundreds of voter suppression laws passed. A recent analysis of nearly a billion votes cast in federal general elections between 2008 and 2022 found “significant and robust evidence” that turnout of minority voters dropped sharply in parts of the country that had been covered by the Voting Rights Act, “translating to hundreds of thousands of uncast ballots by voters of color.”

Yesterday, in Callais, SCOTUS “updated” the part of the VRA that stood in the way of total disenfranchisement: challenges to voting district maps could still be brought, after the fact, on the basis of racial discrimination.

With this ruling, plaintiffs must prove that the mapmakers had racist, not just political, intent, something that is virtually impossible to prove. “Race-neutral” voter regulations are how Southern states managed to neutralize the Fifteenth Amendment, giving formerly enslaved people and their descendants the vote, from a year into Reconstruction until 1965. Along with freelance white supremacist terrorist violence, states kept Black people from voting with poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, and other impediments to registration that were applied only against Black citizens.

That’s why the 20th-century Civil Rights movement was necessary.

Partisan legislatures have been permitted to gerrymander to advantage their parties, which always seemed insane to me (some state constitutions forbid it). But because race and politics significantly overlap, especially in the South — Black people vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, whites for Republicans — in preventing racial discrimination the VRA also prevented partisan discrimination. After today, not only will minority voters be effectively barred from voting for a candidate of their choice, so will Democrats.

The South is rushing to redraw its electoral districts before the midterms, or at the latest before 2028. The result is likely to be at least an additional 27 GOP seats in the U.S. House. In state elections, gerrymandering has the effect of packing legislatures with members of the party that drew the maps, even when they are the electoral minority. That guarantees that the maps will never again be drawn fairly.

The Washington Post reported:

An analysis by the Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter found that up to 19 congressional districts protected by the Voting Rights Act could be redrawn into safe Republican House seats in the South, along with eliminating 191 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the region.

“We’re very likely to see the biggest drop in minority representation of the modern era — maybe even bigger than the drop we saw in the end of Reconstruction,” Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos told the Post.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Brown Jackson, quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Shelby County: “The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—’one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’”

Kagan continued:

It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.

The mainstream media were typically mealy mouthed this morning about the ruling. “In Narrowing Voting Rights Act, Conservative Justices See Progress on Racism,” read the headline of the Times’ analysis. Its news story is headlined “Some Black Southerners Say Voting Rights Ruling ‘Missed the Mark.’”

Neither the Times nor the Post led with the story. The Guardian’s US edition did, with a special report. And Guardian columnist Moira Donegan wrote a particularly powerful piece. Its headline: The supreme court’s voting rights decision is a death knell for American democracy.