US Supreme Court
PHOTO : GRAEME SLOAN/EPA

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that Louisiana will have to redraw their congressional districts in a key decision that effectively guts the Voting Rights Act (VCA).

The Voting Rights act was passed to outlaw racial discrimination in voting.

Victory for MAGA

'Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,' Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, wrote for the majority opinion. 'Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state's use of race-based redistricting here. The state's attempt to satisfy the middle district's ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,' according to The Guardian.

The effective gutting of the VCA has long been a dream for many conservatives.

All six conservative judges voted for the ruling.

Liberal Judges Disent

All three liberal judges dissented with Justice Elana Kagan writing the dissent.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court had now accomplished a "demolition of the Voting Rights Act. The court's decision on Wednesday is the latest in a series that dismantled the law, she wrote, including a major decision in 2013 case, Shelby County vs. Holder, that nullified another major provision in the law that required places with a history of discrimination to get changes pre-approved by the federal government before they went into effect.'

'Under the court's new view of section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens' voting power,' Kagan wrote in a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 'The majority claims only to be 'updat[ing]' our section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. In fact, those 'updates' eviscerate the law.'

Reactions from the Left and Right

Civil rights advocates were quick to denounce the decision. Derrick Johnson, the head of the NAACP, said in a statement: 'The supreme court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy.' Barack Obama said the decision allowed 'state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities – so long as they do it under the guise of 'partisanship' rather than explicit 'racial bias'.

Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill, praised the decision. 'The supreme court has ended Louisiana's long-running nightmare of federal courts coercing the state to draw a racially discriminatory map. That was always unconstitutional, and this is a seismic decision reaffirming equal protection under our nation's laws,' she said.

The White House called the decision 'a complete and total victory.'

'The color of one's skin should not dictate which congressional district you belong in,' Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. 'We commend the court for putting an end to the unconstitutional abuse of the Voting Rights Act and protecting civil rights.'

'Such a declaration is not only out of line with text, it is also out of line with the history of section 2,' Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles wrote in a blogpost. In 1982, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to clarify that proving intentional discrimination was not necessary to win a case under section 2.

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