Slate: “Merrill v. Milligan is a case about redistricting in Alabama. More specifically, it’s about Alabama Republicans’ responsibility to provide Black Alabamians with what’s known as a meaningful opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. This concept flows from the Voting Rights Act, which acknowledges that in many states in this country, voting is racially polarized.
The way the Voting Rights Act deals with this is it contemplates majority-minority districts—districts in which Black Alabamians comprise a majority so that they can elect who they want. For context, so you can understand how serious and how grimly predictive this is, the number of Black candidates who have won a congressional election in a majority white district in Alabama is zero. So, Merrill is about how many of these majority-minority districts there need to be. Is the answer two, or is the answer one?…
I’m going to cut it off there because I don’t think you need to go much further into the technical intricacies of this particular case. What I want reporting to focus on is Milligan’s place in just this unrelenting series of cases that the Supreme Court has handed down, especially over the past 10 years, since Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, that are paring back the Voting Rights Act to basically nothing.
To understand why they’ve done that, we’ve got to go back in time a little bit, right? It’s the ‘80s. Reagan is president. Hair is big. One of the hottest young lawyers in D.C. is this guy John Roberts, who famously writes these memos as a member of Reagan’s Department of Justice about how violations of the Voting Rights Act, and I’m quoting here, “should not be too easy to prove.” This is not a policy view that John Roberts has relaxed on over the rest of his career. He is unrelentingly on the side of eroding away the Voting Rights Act.” [CLICK FOR AUDIO DISCUSSION]