Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court’s recent party-line decision destroying what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, is riddled with half-truths and whole lies.
Writing for the six-justice Republican majority, Justice Sam Alito announced that Section 2 of the VRA offers no protection to voters of color unless they show an “objective likelihood” of “intentional racial discrimination.” He insisted that the Court has “not overruled” its precedents, and failed to mention that, just three years ago, the Court reaffirmed that the VRA “turns on the presence of discriminatory effects, not discriminatory intent.”
Alito also claimed that the Court’s creation of an intent requirement is “the best reading of the statutory text,” and ensures that the VRA “does not intrude on States’ prerogative to draw districts based on nonracial factors.” He left out the fact that Congress explicitly amended the VRA in 1982 so that states couldn’t avoid liability for illegal racial gerrymanders by trotting out, in the words of the Senate Report that accompanied the amendments, a “non-racial rationalization.”
Perhaps the most significant lie comes in Alito’s rebuke of congressional maps that courts and legislatures create under the VRA as a remedy for racial gerrymanders. Although he acknowledged in the first sentence of Callais that Congress designed the Voting Rights Act “to enforce the Constitution,” he then claimed that creating new maps to restore the political power of targeted communities of color is “the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”
The Constitution forbids no such thing. In simple, direct language, the Fifteenth Amendment establishes that citizens’ right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged” on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” And it says that Congress “shall have power” to enforce this prohibition “by appropriate legislation.” It is a concise yet capacious grant of authority to Congress to protect voters of color. By dramatically narrowing that power in Callais, the conservative justices did more than gut the Voting Rights Act. They posed an unmistakable threat to any future congressional effort to build a multiracial democracy, too.
