The U.S. Supreme Court, which twice in the last decade has struck down or neutered provisions of the the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, may well be poised to do it again
More than a quarter of the state's population is African American, but in only 1 of 7 districts do minority voters have a realistic chance of electing the candidate of their choice. In January, a three-judge federal court panel that included two Trump appointees ruled unanimously that under the Voting Rights Act, Alabama should create not just one, but two compact congressional districts with a majority or close to a majority of Black voters.
Indeed Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to make clear that the voting rights law was aimed at eliminating discriminatorywhether or not there was intentional discrimination. In short, for example, the law is aimed at preventing practices that have the effect of diluting the political power of minority voters by lumping them into a single district with a super-majority of Black voters and then spreading the remaining minority voters out over the other districts.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed to the history of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enacted after the Civil War to guarantee political power to formerly enslaved people."When I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the Equal Protection Clause ... in a race conscious way," she said.
"There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama's map," he said."The Black Belt is a historic and extremely poor community of substantial significance. Yet Alabama's map cracks that community and allows white block voting to deny Black voters the opportunity to elect representation responsive to their needs."
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