John Roberts’ effort to gut the Voting Rights Act is complete
By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
(CNN) — The Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday rolling back protections for Black and Latino voters marks another dramatic turn in the long-fought effort by conservative justices to reverse measures vital to overcoming America’s legacy of race discrimination.
The decision also marks a defining moment for the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, who declared soon after joining the bench in 2005, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Three years ago, the justices by the same 6-3 vote as Wednesday ended racial affirmative action in higher education admissions. The newest decision, which follows a series of rulings led by Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito restricting the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, will reverberate deeper.
Taken as a whole, the pattern would mean fewer chances for minority voters to elect candidates of their choosing. That, in turn, would mean fewer opportunities for the voice of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities in government.
The gravity of such consequences and the entrenched divisions among the justices were clear as the opinion was announced from the courtroom bench.
As Roberts first revealed that the case of Louisiana v. Callais would be delivered, he said Alito had the majority opinion. Roberts, whose seniority gives him the assignment power, had turned the case over to a colleague with whom he has long worked on racial issues.
Belying the historic nature of the decision, Alito began in his usual dry tone, detailing the lower court action in the long running Louisiana case, which began with redistricting after the 2020 census. He related the intricacies of the VRA’s disputed Section 2 that prohibits discrimination and recounted the evolution of standards for assessing when Black and other minority voters may succeed in a challenge to district maps that dilute their voting power.
Such dilution can arise, for example, from legislative “cracking” and “packing” methods – that is, dispersing or concentrating Black voters among districts to weaken their overall voting power.
No longer would challengers be able to point to the effects of vote dilution, Alito said. Rather, they would have to show that state legislators likely had discriminatory purpose or, as Alito spelled out in his opinion, that “circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”
Alito’s bench statement and written opinion on behalf of the six conservative justices leaned heavily on the view of Roberts’ 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that voting safeguards enshrined in 1965 were no longer essential to America.
“(V)ast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South…” Alito wrote. Adapting a line from Roberts’ 2013 decision, he added: “As this Court has recognized, ‘things have changed dramatically’ in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.”
When Justice Elena Kagan, who sits next to Alito on the elevated bench, then spoke for the three dissenting liberals, she referred explicitly and emphatically to Shelby County and the line of cases eviscerating voting rights protections.
“This court’s project to destroy the Voting Rights Act is now complete,” she declared. Of the act, she said, “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.”
As both Roberts and Alito looked out at spectators expressionless, Kagan said, “For over a decade, this court has set its sights on the Voting Rights Act.”
Indeed, Wednesday’s decision may have been inevitable, given the transformed bench since Roberts took control over two decades ago. Four new conservative justices have joined, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term.
Now the Roberts Court’s goal notably aligns with Trump’s own efforts to curtail voting-rights protections and influence the upcoming midterm elections. Officials in some Republican-dominated states, including Florida, were immediately poised Wednesday to take advantage of the ruling and redraw their maps.
And with what Kagan described as the court’s “made-up and impossible-to-meet evidentiary standards,” she warned that the decision “greenlights districting plans” that would disadvantage minorities nationwide.
George W. Bush nominees work in tandem
Roberts has led the court to end race-based policies in public schools, in higher education and, most sweepingly, in voting laws. With a few exceptions, he has been in sync with Alito, who joined the bench in January 2006, four months after Roberts.
Both men were appointed by President George W. Bush, and while they differ temperamentally and in regard for institutional appearances, they are more often than not together.
When Roberts held prominent roles in the Ronald Reagan and then George H.W. Bush administrations in the 1980s and 1990s, he advocated for a limited interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. In memos from the time, Roberts demonstrated that he believed federal protections for Black, Hispanic and other minority voters from the 1960s civil rights era were no longer warranted.
Only since becoming chief justice has he been able to carry through on his vision. It was a vision Alito wove throughout Wednesday’s opinion.
He included several references to the landmark Shelby County decision. In that 2013 case, the majority dismantled a part of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to obtain Justice Department approval before changing their election procedures.
Alito joined him in 2013 and earlier, in a 2006 case, when Roberts wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” (Alito was the only justice to sign that opinion, a partial dissent and concurrence, in a Texas redistricting dispute.)
It was in a 2007 school integration controversy when Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Alito, along with other conservatives, joined the chief justice there, as well as in 2023 when Roberts led the court to end racial affirmative action. Alito made a brief reference to that Harvard case Wednesday, too.
Midterms looming
Most crucial for the nation’s history of race discrimination, Wednesday’s action further diminishes the iconic 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law that brought the franchise to Black voters and other racial minorities who’d been kept from the polls.
The VRA was passed only after the “Bloody Sunday” attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. During that March 7, 1965, encounter, sheriff’s deputies beat civil rights marchers as they tried to cross the bridge.
With such history, this area of the law has long produced sharply divided opinions, and there were earlier signs that the justices were struggling with the Louisiana controversy.
The Louisiana case had first been argued two years ago, but then the justices called for reargument, foreshadowing that the conservatives might be headed for a substantial ruling affecting voting rights not only in Louisiana but across the nation.
A lower federal court had found Louisiana legislators likely violated Section 2 and ordered a second Black-majority district created. (Previously, only one of the six Louisiana congressional districts had a Black majority.)
A group of White residents then challenged the redrawn map, arguing that the common Section 2 remedy amounted to a breach of the Constitution’s equality guarantee. The group pointed to the high court’s broader trend of disfavoring race-based programs.
The justices had slightly departed from that pattern in a 2023 redistricting case from Alabama, when they said that the use of race was not only permissible but might be required, to compensate for a prior discriminatory map. That will now be seen as a one-off.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court did not explicitly go as far as the White challengers wanted, to outlaw any consideration of race to remedy an allegedly biased map. Still, in the highly partisan world of redistricting, it will be difficult for any challenger to produce evidence that a district was drawn not for any political reasons but based specifically to dilute Black or Latino voting power.
The Alito majority picked up from a 2021 ruling he had written in the Arizona case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. There, the same six-justice majority limited the Voting Right Act Section 2 coverage for certain electoral practices that did not involve redistricting. The court upheld requirements that ballots cast at the wrong precinct be discarded and that criminalized the third-party collection of absentee ballots (such as were sometimes used in remote tribal areas of the state).
Alito pointed to the decision as another precedent paving the way for view of VRA liability only when a practice is motivated by a discriminatory purpose.
Kagan did not quarrel with the assertion but rather used it to reinforce her argument that the conservative majority had been strategically building to this moment – a moment that she said conflicted with the essential goal of the Voting Rights Act.
“Even after the Fifteenth Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, state officials routinely deprived African Americans of their voting rights,” she recounted.
“Through a seemingly boundless array of mechanisms – most of them facially race-neutral and among them the drawing of district lines – States either prevented Black citizens from casting ballots or ensured that their votes would count for next to nothing,” Kagan wrote.
“The Voting Rights Act was meant as the corrective,” she added.
Roberts in 2013 and Alito on Wednesday acknowledged the legacy surrounding the Voting Rights Act. But as happened in the 2013 milestone, Alito and the others in the majority deployed that success to brush aside the remaining effects of racial bias.
“‘(O)ur Nation has made great strides’ in eliminating racial discrimination in voting,” Alito wrote Wednesday, citing Roberts in 2013. “And if, as a result of this progress, it is hard to find pertinent evidence relating to intentional present-day voting discrimination, that is cause for celebration.”
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