From "Live Updates: Supreme Court Strikes Down Louisiana Map in Voting Rights Case" (NYT).
Although the justices struck down Louisiana’s map, the court’s conservative majority upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act itself. Voting rights groups had feared that the court might use the case to gut the remaining provisions of the landmark civil rights law.
AND: Here's the opinion: Louisiana v. Callais. It's 6-3, in the usual way, and Justice Alito writes for the majority.
ADDED: From the majority opinion: "The question before us now is whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination. To answer that question, we must understand exactly what §2 of the Voting Rights Act demands with respect to the drawing of legislative districts.... §2 imposes liability 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.... In [Rucho], we held that claims of partisan gerrymandering are not justiciable in federal court. The upshot of Rucho was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.... [T]he Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, [so] no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8."
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54 comments:
DEIsm.
Here's what Justice Thomas says:
"I join the Court’s opinion in full. This Court should never
have interpreted §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups “an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.” Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S.
30, 93 (1986) (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment); see
ante, at 23–24. By doing so, the Court led legislatures and
courts to “systematically divid[e] the country into electoral
districts along racial lines.” Holder v. Hall, 512 U. S. 874,
905 (1994) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment). “Blacks
[we]re drawn into ‘black districts’ and given ‘black representatives’; Hispanics [we]re drawn into Hispanic districts,and given ‘Hispanic representatives’; and so on.” Ibid. That interpretation rendered §2 “repugnant to any nation that
strives for the ideal of a color-blind Constitution.” Id., at
905–906. Today’s decision should largely put an end to this
“disastrous misadventure” in voting-rights jurisprudence.
Id., at 893.
Special Peculiar Liberal Conceit
Pin the tail on the wise ass, she's done.
This at least was the expected result.
Of course both the R's and D's want electrol districts drawn on racial lines. The R's want to pack all the blacks into one or two Democrat district. The D's want to keep the R's from spreading them out so only R's get elected.
Yes because the VRA should have had an expiration date, Elena.
I don't know the case law, But off the top of my head I'd assume Grandma O'Connor was leading this sort of nonsense. Just as she kept Afffirmative action in a confused ruling, and even forbade California from segregating prisoners by race (thereby leading to gang violence and conflict).
Ironically, blacks voting overwhelmingly for a single party has reduced their political power. The Democrats give away bread and circuses to keep them happy, while the Republicans ignore them at every opportunity.
The post-FDR elite left found a game plan that benefits the elite left.
They way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race…
…now how is NYT felling about that Republicans are in Trouble claptrap from yesterday?
Leftists sure do love segregation.
Again, as always, and has been the case for 35 years, the liberal/left justices vote as a bloc. And vote their poltics. Either get rid of Judicial power or put Republicans in that vote THEIR politics. Its absurd that we have 6 justices (more like 5) trying to base their decisions to the actual constitution and their judicial philosophy, while the other 3 (plus Roberts) vote their political beliefs.
The attacks on Republicans both physical and verbal have finally been internalized by conservatives. Midterms here we come.
If all of America's different and ethnicities could just live among each other, like a bag of costco mixed nuts (which are delicious btw..) or a jar of jelly beans none of this would be a problem.
How do we get all the AWFLs no move to a few concentrated areas?? One can only dream....
"Although the justices struck down Louisiana’s map, the court’s conservative majority upheld the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act itself."
"Missed it by that much."
AAG Dhillon just wrote, "Extremely gratified to see this decision we’ve been waiting for! I was proud to co-author the brief for the United States as amicus in this important case, perhaps one of the most important developments in decades in Voting Rights Act jurisprudence!"
Its decisions like this that make me think "Thank God Trump go elected in 2016". Imagine if Hillary had won! Which was OK with "True Conservatives" like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro.
Had Hillary been elected we'd have a 5-4 Liberal/left bloc with Chief Justice Kagan.
If the government considers racial groups, we need a criteria for being part of that racial group. We've had people lie about their race, but people can be wrong without lying. How Black was Obama?
If it's going to be a subjective category, government shouldn't be using or tacking or recording race.
Once again - the progressive on the court are down-right frightening.
How does one align today's decision with the one from 2023 that forced Alabama to create a second black Democrat district? How do Roberts and Kavanaugh explain their two decisions?
This part of the voting rights act is discriminatory, anachronistic, and unconstitutional. It should be gutted.
Since the entire purpose of gerrymandering is to disenfranchise voters, I'd like the Court to step in and set better rules around how districts can be drawn. I.e., all information other than raw population numbers should be excluded from the process.
For the love of all that's holy, the NYT couldn't find a better photo of Kagan?
It's 6-3, in the usual way
A cis-verdict. One where the opinions were assigned at confirmation.
The Voting Rights Act was “designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it,” Alito wrote for the majority. “Unfortunately, lower courts have applied [court] precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”
That's a good reason to leave the VRA intact, then, if we prune away the uses that DO violate the Constitution by deciding things "on race."
"Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them."
Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
How does one align today's decision with the one from 2023 that forced Alabama to create a second black Democrat district? How do Roberts and Kavanaugh explain their two decisions?
I imagine they'd say the first decision aligns with the idea the VRA was properly drafted and was in alignment with past precedent.
And the second allowed them to consider whether that portion of the VRA continued to be so.
Keep in mind that affirmative action was upheld by the court, while also stating that it would not continue to do so in the future. (see: O'Connor, Sandra Day)
SCOTUSBlog refers to the decision as Calais, not Louisiana. Guess we know who they root for…
"Voting Rights" That's funny.
Anybody can vote multiple times, use someone else's ballot, vote even if not a citizen, vote in multiple states, vote after death, have their vote thrown away, or buried in a pile of manufactured ballots, and it seems the hardest thing to do is get an audit of votes to determine how much of any of that was done. In fact, trying to stop voter fraud is more likely to get you in jail than doing the fraud. We have the least secure system in the free world. Without election integrity there are no "voting rights". It's election theater, just like the TSA is security theater.
I'll have to do some more research but my memory is that Alabama made the exact same argument that prevailed on the part of Louisiana. Roberts and Kavanaugh has some explaining to do.
Am become critical of Mr Trump's nonsense to a degree I wasn't before the Iranian adventure; a decision like this, however, reminds me how very much worse Mrs Clinton's presidency would have been. It is an amusing exercise, though, to imagine what the NYT front pages would have looked like without each day's collection of Trump-critical articles.
Bagoh. # Smithsonian/under glass and chef's kiss.
Blanl pages. like they live
Yeah, I remember when Atlanta set up free state voter ID kiosks, trailers, and office space every five feet apart so that black voters "wouldn't be disenfranchised." Turned out black voters were already perfectly capable of having gotten legitimate ID in order to receive driver's licenses, social security checks, bank accounts, mortgages, credit cards, so on and so on, and tall grass grew around the kiosks. And some elected fraud's brother made big bucks putting them there. And then John Lewis called all white people klansmen in the next election on the radio 50 times a day, to the sounds of snarling dogs in the background. So the black mafia elected another crook.
Now keisha bottoms is up for the senate, are they cereal
To the corrupt democratic party - securing election integrity scares them, so they lie and call it "disenfranchisement".
Another massive LIE told to their hungry-for-more-lies, cult-like base.
If Hillary had been elected in 2016, she'd have carried around an "Easy Button" and pushed it all the time. She'd then have wondered why nothing was easy and why the resets didn't work.
She'd have continued Obama's back room statism and her husband's "pay to play" Lincoln Bedroom rental model. We'd have had an EU-style thick bureaucracy, and everything from Crossfire Hurricane to COVID and beyond would have been buried by de facto state media as "ultra-right conspiracy theories."
This decision may help me during my May oral argument in the 8th Circuit!
Thanks Ann for flagging the most important part of the decision.
Just another demonstration of the genius of our nation’s founders. A form of government that for better or worse has retained most of our freedoms. Sometimes by a thin thread. Better than the alternatives.
This decision is the best example of the real "long game" that we have seen unveiled during the reign of King Donald (part 2).
Politically, the applied mathematics of this on 2028, followed by the redistricting after the 2030 census, will result in an existential fate for the Democrats as we have known them. The Curley Effect rolled out in populous blue states will make them bluer, but into fewer seats in our congress as those with means bail out to friendlier places for people with property. They can't cut trees down fast enough in St Johns county to keep up with it these days.
Yes, there will likely be riots. Kagan slow-rolled this as long as she could. Now others will respond.
Leave Kagan and the other two idiots swinging slowly in the wind.
The 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections will be some of the most important in the nation's history. Not because they ended a war, or greatly expanded the nation's influence or territory, although they likely will do at least two of those. The importance of this period will be the exposure of corruption, and weakness throughout our nation and the world that has gradually infected everything everywhere at the expense of progress, justice and freedom. True competence may come back as a value, and lies and theft will be assumed and resisted rather than hidden and accepted. This change is absolutely necessary at this time in history just moments before the rot became too entrenched and powerful to be overcome with anything short of widespread bloodshed. We may have saved ourselves from suicide, and the indispensable weapon of our salvation is free speech. It doesn't win every battle, but it let's you know who the enemy is and what weapons they use.
Waiting for Howard, Inga, and the rest to come along and tell us why we need to keep discriminating on the basis of race and how Republicans are the "real racists" for not wanting to segregate people based on their skin color, unlike "enlightened Democrats" who know that the best way to stop racism is to treat people differently based on their skin color.
Dayum, Wince, @10:04am!
Add a little facial hair and a keffiyeh and Kagan could pass for the late Yasir Yurafart.
I grew up in the 1950's and 60's, when anti-black racial bigotry was still within the range of "normal" among the less educated. Bigotry hasn't disappeared and probably never will. But there are vast qualitative and quantitative differences between today's bigotry, and that of 70 years ago. It's time to treat people of every skin color as equals, for better and for worse. This time had to come.
The only real obstacle to progress is the possibility of Democrats being successful in the coming midterms. They want to come in, shit all over the construction site and steal the materials. Exactly what they did at the border, but on a larger scale and with less self-control, if that's even possible.
"The justices, split along ideological lines, ruled that the voting map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander."
I love how they are honest about the court not even bothering to pretend like they are judges or there is any sort of judicial process.
They are just politicians using power they were never meant to have.
ai: "The "living constitution" argument posits that the U.S. Constitution is a dynamic document that evolves over time, adapting to new societal values, technologies, and circumstances without requiring formal amendments."
"The argument for a Living Constitution is generally presented first by progressive or liberal legal scholars, judges, and proponents of broader judicial interpretation."
However, when it comes to The Voting Rights Act, it's eternally Groundhog Day, 1965 edition. Phil can check out any time he wants, but you can never leave.
Countries with sizable ethnic groups that historically mistreated each other, and try to make up for that history with a de-jure ethnic spoils system, tend not to do that well. Look at Yugoslavia, Lebanon (religion is just a shibboleth for tribe), countries with Chinese/Malay conflict, countries with Indian/black conflict, and of course South Africa.
Best solution would be for everyone to join my Miscegenation Party, put on a tan hat, and Make Mama Late Again! In two generations we’ll be one big happy light brown family.
Short of that, maybe we do need to move away from a spoils system disguised as fair play, to an overt spoils system.
Here’s a hypo: what if we had a Black Peoples Party? And a Mundo Hispano party? And the rumps of the Ds and Rs became an Anglo American Party? And these three parties tried to hammer out congressional districts, purely out of partisan interests - which happen to map (pun intended) almost exactly to ethnic interests? CC, JSM
Achilles pretty much described Democrat Justices at 12:11.
Maynard said...
Achilles pretty much described Democrat Justices at 12:11
All 7 of them.
The NYT headlines states: The justices, split along ideological lines...
What ideologies are those?
What they mean, but didn't want to say is, The justices, split along party lines.
They are giving the right this win to make the birthright citizenship loss more palatable.
Bob Boyd said...
The NYT headlines states: The justices, split along ideological lines...
What ideologies are those?
Those who believe the words in the constitution mean something vs. those who believe the justices are god priests who are the actual rulers of the United States.
https://x.com/FischerKing64/status/2049544465573151061
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