The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a surprising 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case from Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting a Republican-led effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh aligned with the court’s liberals in affirming a lower-court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black. The state now will have to draw a new map for next year’s elections.
This is actually a tough call. Race shouldn't be a consideration in drawing congressional districts. That's what the Alabama legislature may have done. The Supreme Court's decision may be good on narrow grounds—if the districts were drawn on racial grounds. But more broadly, it left in place the doctrine that race can be a consideration by approving the idea that the racial makeup of the districts must match the racial makeup of the state population. This is clearly racist. It implies that a person's opinions are determined by skin color. That is a racist premise.
If it had been found that the redistricting lines had been drawn with race in mind, that would be racist and it would be right to invalidate the redistricting scheme. But if the case was decided based on the idea that the district lines must be drawn based on the racial makeup of the state, that would be racist.
The latter seems to be the case. State congressional districts are drawn by legislatures, which typically draw districts based on political calculations, such as to favor one political party or other or protect incumbents. This is called gerrymandering (which, of course, the politicians vehemently deny doing). If the Alabama district map was drawn purely on political considerations, it may be unsavory but would not be racist. Section 2 of the Voting rights act reads:
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified in Section 4(f)(2) of the Act. Most of the cases arising under Section 2 since its enactment involved challenges to at-large election schemes, but the section's prohibition against discrimination in voting applies nationwide to any voting standard, practice, or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.
Any citizen. Singular. My emphasis. Clearly, no citizen’s right to vote was denied or abridged, the Left’s hyperbole notwithstanding. The right to vote is being conflated with the “right” to certain electoral outcomes.* But the Voting Rights Act does not guarantee the election of candidates favored by some racial group majority. It guarantees that each individual has the same right to vote regardless of race. Period. The idea that because black residents make up 1/4 of the state‘s population that 1/4 of elected representatives must be black (or supported by a black majority) is nowhere consistent with equality before the law. It is racist. Yet somehow the Voting Rights Act has been recast by court rulings to promote racial proportionality in electoral outcomes, rather than protect the right to vote, thus eroding the importance of the individual right to vote.
Why? Spurred on by activists demanding racial proportionality in election outcomes, Section 2 was amended in 1982. That didn’t help. The amendment concluded with
The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population. [Italics in original]
On the face of it, this makes no sense at all. But the vague language of the amendment cracked the door open to race-based outcomes as a valid consideration. Courts have used that opening to the hilt. The Roberts court affirmed that perversion of the clear language of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which unequivocally forbids discrimination based on race.
Supporters of the decision jumped through hoops to distort the facts and justify the obvious pro-racist nature of the ruling. “Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race,” declared Attorney General Merrick Garland, in lauding a ruling that actually erodes genuine voting rights by preserving racist redistricting. “We are grateful that the Supreme Court upheld what we knew to be true: that everyone deserves to have their vote matter and their voice heard,” said Evan Milligan, the lead plaintiff in the case, in lauding a ruling that melts the importance of individuals’ vote and voice into a racial collectivist blob—and shamelessly declares the one’s vote and voice only “matters” when one’s favored candidate wins.
Yet in no district were any voter’s right to vote denied or disparaged. No one’s vote mattered less than anyone else’s. No one’s free speech rights were abridged. Your guy didn’t win? That’s elections. It doesn’t matter how other people who share your skin color voted. We’re all individuals, with one vote. The fact that black people regularly vote Democrat in large percentages, rather than race, may be the reason for only one majority black district. If blacks were more diverse in their politics, the “color” of districts needn’t matter.
Justifying—or perhaps rationalizing—the ruling, Chief Justice John ‘Roberts wrote that the court was declining ‘to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests.’” Thus, Roberts was evading the basic issue, and simply following precedent. But Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the minority, was more succinct:
The other four conservative justices dissented Thursday. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the decision forces “Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it.”
Again, was there evidence that the legislature drew the district lines based on race? Or was it politics? Apparently, there was no evidence of racism. I read Roberts’s opinion, and I saw no allegations of racist intent. Whatever the case, the majority very clearly refused to adhere to the anti-discrimination demands of the Voting Rights Act. This seems to me to be a bad decision.
Whatever the merits of the decision, actual voting rights were not at issue, the Left’s hysteria notwithstanding. The Left and the Democrats incessantly charge that voting rights are imperiled. This is a smokescreen. What they are really trying to do is to protect their cherished racial group conception of voting rights. This is consistent with their collectivist, identity politics ideological orientation. But collectivized “rights” are the antipode of genuine individual rights.
As I said earlier, this is a tough call. There probably should be a better way to draw congressional districts. Just look at NJ’s recent redistricting plan. The Democrats who created it explicitly used race in their calculations. One thing is certain: Drawing congressional districts based on race, in part or in whole, is hostile to the principles of America, of justice, of the Enlightenment, and of a civilized society. It assumes that voters’ choices are determined by skin color, rather than their own reasoning minds; in this case, black people’s voting preferences. Allen v. Milligan appears to have left that degenerate racist practice to stand. As to the question at the top of this post, the answer is obvious.
* [See, in particular, page 17 of the majority opinion, which includes language like “we have reiterated that §2 turns on the presence of discriminatory effects, not discriminatory intent.” “Effects” means not getting the candidate of your racial choice. This means “an individual is disabled from ‘enter[ing] into the political process in a reliable and meaningful manner’.” This amounts to, “my right to vote wasn’t denied or abridged. But my guy didn’t win, so it must be racism.”]
Related Reading:
Woke Redistricting Madness in NJ
Jesse Jackson’s Big Lie: ‘American Democracy is Under Siege’
Collectivized Rights—Ayn Rand
Ruling on redistricting, the Supreme Court again repudiates colorblind law by George F. Will
A Gerrymandering Cure Worse than the Disease
Memo to John D. Atlas: How About Let's Not Suppress Anybody's Vote, or Voice
