By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act – making it harder for minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark civil rights law – in a victory for Louisiana Republicans and President Donald Trump’s administration.
The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative members, blocked an electoral map that had given Louisiana a second Black-majority U.S. congressional district. With November congressional elections looming, the decision could prompt Republican-led states to seek to redraw electoral maps in an effort to put at risk U.S. House of Representatives seats considered safely Democratic.
The court’s liberal justices, civil rights leaders, Democratic lawmakers and some legal experts denounced the decision as severely undermining Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress enacted to bar electoral maps that would result in diluting the clout of minority voters.
“I love it,” Trump told reporters after hearing of the decision, adding that he thinks that Republican-led states would now want to reconfigure their voting maps.
Section 2 had gained greater significance as a bulwark against racial discrimination in voting after the Supreme Court in 2013 gutted a different part of the Voting Rights Act. Black voters tend to support Democratic candidates.
“This is a devastating and profound step backwards for American Democracy,” Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock wrote on social media.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Wednesday’s ruling was authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by his five fellow conservative justices. The three liberal justices dissented.
REDISTRICTING BATTLES
The ruling was issued amid a battle unfolding in Republican-governed and Democratic-led states around the country involving the redrawing of electoral maps to change the composition of U.S. House districts for partisan advantage ahead of the November elections. Trump and his fellow Republicans hope to retain the party’s razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate.
The full impact of the ruling on the midterms was not immediately clear, though legal experts said states may try to enact new maps. Louisiana, where Black people make up roughly a third of the population, has six U.S. House districts. Louisiana has a primary election set for May 16.
However, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry told Republican House candidates on Wednesday that he plans to suspend next month’s primary elections so state lawmakers can pass a new congressional map first, according to a Washington Post report later in the day.
The governor’s announcement to suspend the May 16 primary could come as early as Friday, a day before early voting is set to start, according to the newspaper.
Section 2 was amended by Congress in 1982 to prohibit electoral maps that would result in undermining the clout of minority voters, even absent direct proof of racist intent.
For more than four decades, plaintiffs could win a Section 2 claim by showing that a voting map had a racially discriminatory impact under this legal standard, known as the “results test.”
The court’s Wednesday ruling, however, effectively turned Section 2 into an “intent test,” experts said. Alito wrote that the focus of Section 2 must now be to enforce the Constitution’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination under the 15th Amendment.
“Only when understood this way does (Section 2) of the Voting Rights Act properly fit within Congress’s 15th Amendment enforcement power,” Alito wrote.
The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870 following the U.S. Civil War that ended slavery, authorizes Congress to pass laws ensuring that the right to vote not be denied “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”
Interpreting Section 2 to “outlaw a map solely because it fails to provide a sufficient number of majority-minority districts would create a right that the amendment does not protect,” Alito added.
In a social media post, Trump praised Alito as “brilliant” and called the ruling “a BIG WIN for Equal Protection under the Law, as it returns the Voting Rights Act to its Original Intent, which was to protect against intentional Racial Discrimination.”
Democratic former President Barack Obama said the ruling frees state legislatures to reconfigure electoral districts to “systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities – so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias.'”
‘A DEAD LETTER’
Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent joined by the two other liberal justices, said the ruling rendered the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter,” and predicted “grave” consequences.
“Under the court’s new view of Section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote. “Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updating’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks.”
“But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law, so that it will not remedy even the classic example of vote dilution given above,” Kagan added.
The Trump administration backed the challenge made in the Louisiana case to the Voting Rights Act, advocating for raising the bar for proving a Section 2 violation.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, said the Supreme Court had reached the “obvious result” in the case.
“We’ll see what effect it has,” Johnson told reporters. “We have, as you know, a primary coming up in about two weeks. So we’ll see if the state legislature deems it appropriate to go in and draw new maps.”
The Congressional Black Caucus, a group of Black U.S. lawmakers, condemned the ruling.
“Without the protections of the VRA, Republicans now have the ability to move forward with a nationwide scheme to rig congressional maps in their favor – to manufacture more districts for themselves by eliminating majority-Black districts, while stripping away the ability to challenge those racist, anti-Black maps in court,” it said in a statement.
Warnock said the ruling gutted the protections that civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. “marched for (and) the protections made possible by civil rights protesters who spilled blood in pursuit of a more perfect union.”
REDRAWING DISTRICTS
In a process called redistricting, the boundaries of legislative districts across the United States are reconfigured to reflect population changes as measured by the national census conducted every 10 years. Redistricting typically has been carried out by state legislatures once per decade.
After Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature adopted a map that included just one Black-majority district following the 2020 census, a group of Black Louisiana voters sued. A judge then ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, deciding that the map likely harmed Black voters in violation of Section 2.
The state legislature responded by drawing a new map that added a second Black-majority district. This map prompted a separate lawsuit by 12 Louisiana voters who described themselves in court papers as “non-African American.” They said the second Black-majority district unlawfully reduced the influence of non-Black voters like them. White people make up a majority of Louisiana’s population.
The redrawn map relied too heavily on race in violation of the constitutional equal protection principle, a three-judge panel found in a 2-1 ruling. The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld that decision.
Edward Greim, a lawyer for the “non-African American” plaintiffs, welcomed the ruling, saying voters had “won a restoration of their right to be treated equally and with dignity as individual citizens.”
ANOTHER VOTING RIGHTS ROLLBACK
The ruling marked the Supreme Court’s latest rollback of Voting Rights Act protections. Its 2013 ruling in a case involving Alabama’s Shelby County gutted a Voting Rights Act provision that had required states and locales with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval to change voting laws.
Republican-led Louisiana initially had argued on the same side as the Black voters but subsequently reversed its stance.
Harvard Law School Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who filed a brief in the case defending the Voting Rights Act, called the ruling “a complete gutting of Section 2.”
“It’s still there, in theory, but no one will be able to win a claim under the provision,” Stephanopoulos said. “States can freely dismantle minority-opportunity districts as long as they make clear they’re doing so for partisan or other political reasons.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this month showed 75% of Americans – including 65% of Black Americans – said race should not be considered when drawing congressional maps. But about five in 10 respondents in the poll – and six in 10 Black respondents – said communities that share characteristics including race should be represented in the same congressional district.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Christian Martinez, Joseph Ax, Bianca Flowers, Ismail Shakil, Jason Lange, David Morgan and Chandni Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Will Dunham)
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