The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has spent years chipping away at the Voting Rights Act. The majority’s 6-3 ruling, taking the teeth out of Section 2 of the act, was not a surprise. In fact, it was the decision that was expected.
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The knee-jerk reaction is that Democrats must pass new voting rights legislation, but a new bill would end up before the conservative Supreme Court at some point, and that means that the country might end up back in the same situation a few years from now.
However, the court did not decide that Section 2 is unconstitutional, and it opened the door for gerrymandering based on partisanship, not race.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin responded to the Supreme Court decision and proposed a solution.
Raskin said in a statement:
The Supreme Court has completed its effective demolition of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA was the crown jewel of the 20th-century civil rights movement, born from the blood of marchers and freedom riders and repeatedly reauthorized by bipartisan majorities in Congress. In an act of extraordinary and cynical judicial activism, six Justices have now ravaged Congress’s express purposes, rewriting and effectively neutralizing Section 2 of the VRA by demanding the very standard of proof to bring a VRA claim—a showing of intentional racial discrimination—that Congress explicitly rejected in 1982.
The Court has now finished the job that it started by gutting Section 5’s preclearance protections in Shelby County v. Holder. That project is a disgrace to the federal judiciary and a permanent stain on this Court’s legacy. Combined with the Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause barring federal courts from policing partisan gerrymandering, today’s ruling is a catastrophe for American democracy. Partisan gerrymanders are now untouchable, as are racial vote dilution schemes that shut minority voters out of the political process so long as they are conveniently redesignated as partisan gerrymanders. Republican legislatures across the South are already preparing to carve up and eliminate majority-minority districts at every level of government. The Court has made the world safe for those horrific and racist gerrymanders. This moment is like the end of political Reconstruction in the 19th century.
The bottom line under the Roberts Court is that the deliberate inclusion of a majority African-American or Hispanic district to promote fair representation is a presumptively unconstitutional ‘racial gerrymander,’ while the deliberate destruction of a majority African-American or Hispanic district is perfectly legal if its announced purpose is the expansion and entrenchment of a ‘partisan gerrymander.’ This is a huge defeat for American democracy.
I call for congressional establishment nationwide of nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions to permanently take map-drawing out of politicians’ hands, and for Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country. Congress must act, right now, to pull the country out of the abyss of constitutional double standards and partisan authoritarianism.
A national ban on gerrymandering is the answer. All congressional districts should be drawn by independent commissions.
Remember that the court’s standard is partisan gerrymandering, which, according to this ruling, is allowed, but if Congress bans the partisan gerrymander, the new law will be Supreme Court-proof, because the conservative majority will have boxed itself out.
Democrats can keep playing games with voting rights legislation that ends up in the courts, or they can aim bigger and make democracy stronger by banning gerrymandering as soon as they get control of Congress and the White House.
It is time for Democrats to put some action behind their talk and aim big to protect voting rights.