U.S. Supreme Court’s Alabama voting map ruling maintains a dire status quo | #elections | #alabama

(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court’s unexpected decision on Thursday to uphold the basic provisions of the Voting Rights Act has been described in some corners as a move to strengthen democracy and a victory for Black voters, with some reports even casting certain justices as saviors of the seminal civil rights law.

The ruling actually preserves an already-dire status quo for minority voting rights established by the court itself. And it all but confirms the charges that Alabama reacted to its growing Black population with a brazen, public effort to exclude those residents from political power via racial gerrymandering.

It’s also worth inspecting what the opinion actually does, alongside what the justices decided not to do: The justices affirmed a lower court’s ruling that a Republican-backed congressional map diluted the voting power of Black residents in Alabama, and it ordered state officials to redraw the maps.

The ruling will presumably reinstate Black Alabamians’ rightful scope of electoral representation – but it does so after those voters were already subjected to the discriminatory maps during elections in May and November of last year. It also means another likely discriminatory map that was used in Louisiana after the court’s intervention might be similarly redrawn.

Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour and a representative in the Alabama Attorney General’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comments about the decision.

Most observers expected the court’s conservatives to narrow Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which includes the law’s general prohibition against race discrimination in voting practices and procedures, but Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals in declining to do so.

The decision reestablishes that the law only requires plaintiffs to show that election practices have biased effects, as opposed to proving that legislators intended to discriminate. And it firmly rejected the notion that the Constitution doesn’t allow any consideration of race — including in terms of remedying past and present racial discrimination — when drawing electoral maps.

Those are meaningful developments, to be sure, but hardly a cause to celebrate, in my view. The opinion simply doesn’t do much to change the regressive path the court has taken on minority voting rights.

First, the court didn’t strengthen the law in any sense. Indeed, Roberts goes to some length to point out that the ruling rests on a nearly 40-year-old interpretation of the 1965 Act and doesn’t disturb existing law.

That precedent, from a 1986 case called Thornburg v. Gingles created a three-part test to show that an electoral law or practice that has led to unequal opportunities based on race is outlawed under Section 2 of the Act.

“The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our [voting rights] jurisprudence anew,” Roberts said, referring to the state’s argument for a “color-blind” evaluation of voting discrimination claims.

That understanding “would require abandoning four decades of the Court’s” precedents, Robert wrote, adding that the approach Alabama was urging is impractical.

Not only did the Alabama ruling not advance existing law, but the Supreme Court has virtually every other vital provision in the Voting Rights Act, and the Gingles standard it left in tact on Thursday is itself deeply flawed.

Roberts’ majority opinion acknowledges that point — citing an amicus brief by law professors and political scientists which highlighted that the court’s Voting Rights Act decisions have caused most plaintiffs to lose their cases.

Litigation under Section 2 “has rarely been successful” for discrimination plaintiffs, Roberts wrote, noting that “plaintiffs nationwide have apparently succeeded in fewer than ten” racial vote dilution lawsuits since 2010, out of 31 overall.

The number of wins is actually inflated, and many other potential plaintiffs with racial vote dilution claims simply don’t bother to file lawsuits, according to the brief. “Why is Section 2’s reach so limited? The essential answer is that this Court has already imposed a series of doctrinal constraints on the provision’s operation,” the professors wrote.

In fact, up until 2006 the court didn’t issue a full opinion holding that a redistricting plan diluted minority voting power under Section 2, despite critical amendments having being enacted in 1982, Richard Pildes wrote in a 2007 paper. Pildes is a professor at the New York University School of Law.

The Supreme Court stopped short of abrogating the basic anti-bias provision of one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation, but that can hardly be described as a victory for minority voting rights.

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