WASHINGTON—The U.S. Supreme Court has destroyed the last remaining section of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act by ruling that Louisiana was out of line by creating a second majority-Black congressional district. The 6-3 decision issued Wednesday, written by Justice Samuel Alito, effectively kills the civil rights law that enabled the nation to replace the dark days of Jim Crow with expanded voting rights for all.
The ruling was also a major win for the white supremacist policies of President Donald Trump and his MAGA backers. They argued before the Court that the Louisiana map expanding voting rights to African Americans discriminated against white people on the basis of race.
The argument was absurd in that the large Black population in Louisiana justifies more than just one district in which it is possible to elect a Black lawmaker. The map that was tossed created a second such district from Baton Rouge and running north along the Mississippi River. Currently, New Orleans is the only district in the state where it has been possible to elect an African American to Congress. The Voting Rights Act permitted, until this latest Supreme Court ruling, the creation of districts that would help guarantee minority representation.
Writing for the right-wing majority and turning reality on its head, Alito wrote: “That map is an unconstitutional gerrymander, and its use would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.” Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Alito ruled, can be invoked only if there is “intentional racial discrimination.” That didn’t happen in Louisiana, he claimed, offering no explanation of what criteria would prove that racist discrimination is “intentional.”
The court’s ruling not only trashes what’s left of the Voting Rights Act but also opens the way for Trump to triumph in the latest chapter in his crusade to keep the slim GOP U.S. House majority this fall.
Florida is the next front
That’s because the pro-Trump majority in the Florida legislature is considering a congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that would wipe out three of the Sunshine State’s four Black-held congressional districts and endanger both Jewish lawmakers, too. Its intent is to convert the Florida delegation from 20-8 Republican to 24-4 Republican.
Organized labor and civil rights groups are fighting the attempt to rig the Florida map. It’s an uphill battle, however, because the state legislature is even more politically gerrymandered than the congressional delegation. On April 28, key committees in both chambers approved DeSantis’s map, sending it to the floor.
“Here are the fast facts to keep in mind as we approach Florida’s attempt” at redistricting, the state AFL-CIO wrote in its latest weekly newsletter from the state capital of Tallahassee. “The majority of Florida voters believe that mid-decade redistricting is a bad idea,” according to a March 29-31 Emerson College poll. It showed remapping losing 44%-56%. Even Republicans were split on it, but only by 14 percentage points. Almost two-thirds of Democrats and independents opposed it.
Several of Florida’s current U.S. House Republicans warn that—given the national mood over inflation, Trump, and his Iran War—the DeSantis remap “could backfire” on the party and spur a wave of votes against them.
Parts of a nationwide map fight
Florida’s action began a day after the Virginia Supreme Court heard the first of three Republican challenges to the legality of the April 21 referendum there where voters approved redrawing its congressional lines in a referendum.
That remap would anchor five congressional districts in the densely populated and heavily Democratic D.C. suburbs and would change the state delegation from 6-5 Democratic to 8-1 Democratic, with the two other districts leaning Democratic.
Virginia is the seventh state to redraw its lines since Trump set off the redistricting war last year by ordering the GOP-gerrymandered Texas legislature to redraw its districts to give the GOP five more U.S. House seats. It accomplished this by packing voters of color into a few districts. Texas is now 25-13 Republican, including a GOP vacancy.
Then California voters, by an almost two-to-one margin, approved a remap there to potentially switch five seats in its 52-member delegation from Republican to Democratic. Democrats now have a 42-7 edge, with two vacancies and one GOP-leaning independent.
Ohio followed with a remap switching at least one Democratic district—and endangering Congress’s longest-serving female lawmaker, pro-worker Rep. Marcy Kaptur.
North Carolina and Missouri redrew maps with the goal of eliminating one Democratic African-American lawmaker each, while Utah’s Supreme Court sided with its voters and drew its own map, unifying leaning-blue Salt Lake City into one district. It’s now split into four, all Republican.
One of the four Utahns, former professional football player Burgess Owens, who is African-American, promptly retired. He had been redistricted out of his seat.
The net of all the seat-switching war is a wash, if the Virginia referendum result stands. DeSantis wants to make sure the Republicans retain their current five-seat U.S. House edge: 217-212, plus the California independent and five vacancies, three of them Democratic.
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