NY Times: “Last Friday, the Supreme Court all but announced how it would rule on the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The case in question, Louisiana v. Callais, which was heard for the first time in March, is a dispute over the drawing of the state’s six congressional districts. Nearly one-third of Louisianans are Black, but in 2022 state lawmakers drew just one district where those Black voters had a reasonable chance of electing a representative of their choice….
A federal appeals court sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the Louisiana State Legislature to draw a new map with a second majority-Black congressional district, which it did. But this map was challenged by a group of self-described “non-African American” voters, who charged that it was an illegal racial gerrymander. It’s this case that the Supreme Court has decided in essence to hear again, and it is for this case that the court wants the parties to address “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
Under the current Supreme Court’s vision of a rigidly colorblind Constitution — indifferent to either racial inequality or the mechanisms of color caste — the answer is very likely to be yes. There is also the matter of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led the court’s effort to curb, limit and undermine the Voting Rights Act. One assumes that having gotten the court to strike down one part of the law in 2013, he is eager to get it to strike down another, considering his decades-long hostility to the law, which has been in his sights since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration.”