The Supreme Court Is Showing Its Boundless Contempt for Black Voters
To that end, Congress amended the VRA in 1982 to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling and specifically prohibit laws that had a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent, under Section 2. The high court accepted Congress’s vote-dilution framework in the 1986 case Thornburg v. Gingles and laid out a multi-part test to determine when and how racial-gerrymandering claims could succeed. (Borden and Gingles did not involve racial-gerrymandering claims per se, but the impact on them is identical.)
Since Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the high court in 2005, the Supreme Court has grown steadily more hostile to the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the court’s conservative majority struck down the VRA’s preclearance formula in Shelby County v. Holder because the justices thought it was outdated and violated the “equal sovereignty of the states,” a bespoke principle to which the court has never returned. That ruling freed many jurisdictions, mostly in the South, from seeking preapproval from federal courts or officials before changing their voting laws. A wave of voting restrictions soon followed.
In the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court took aim at Section 2 as applied to state voting laws. Alito, writing for the court, threw up a wave of new constraints on Section 2 claims to state election laws. Transmuting Fox News talking points into the law of the land, he even claimed that states could overcome Section 2 challenges to voting laws by invoking the phantasmal threat of voter fraud. “The majority creates a set of extra-textual exceptions and considerations to sap the Act’s strength, and to save laws like Arizona’s,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “No matter what Congress wanted, the majority has other ideas.”