No. of Recommendations: 5
I know Roberts laments this view and talks about making unpopular decisions, but this one seems to hurt individual people, and a class race. I'm sure some people have read more on this, but here's Reason on it, and I favor Kagan.
1. Congressional Redistricting and the Voting Rights Act
In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6–3 Court, divided along partisan lines, invalidated a majority-black congressional district as an illegal gerrymander that unconstitutionally sorted voters by race.
The dispute originated in 2022 when a group of voters challenged a new Louisiana congressional map, arguing that it violated the Voting Rights Act's prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. A federal judge agreed, so Louisiana added a new majority-black district to its congressional map to comply with the judge's ruling. A different group of voters, however, then challenged that new majority-black district, arguing that it was an illegal racial gerrymander.
Writing yesterday for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that the initial 2022 ruling by the lower court amounted to an impermissible misreading of the Voting Rights Act. According to Alito, that act should come into play "only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race." And the original 2022 challenge to the Louisiana map, Alito argued, "would have failed to show an objective likelihood of intentional discrimination based on the totality of circumstances."
Writing in dissent, Justice Elena Kagan offered a different vision of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that Congress, under its power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment's right to vote, can and should be able to "prohibit electoral schemes based on their vote-diluting effects, regardless whether a State could offer up some race-neutral explanation."
In other words, while Alito emphasized the importance of identifying "intentionally" discriminatory state action, Kagan stressed that "even race-neutral [state] actions could perpetuate purposeful racial discrimination." The triumph of the Alito view over the Kagan view means that the Voting Rights Act will now have a very limited role to play in all such redistricting cases going forward.
Me: My summation is that it is now required that you have to prove a discriminatory intent, and the defendant can just say we wanted to retain power.
