Why the Supreme Court Declined an Opportunity to Diminish the Voting Rights Act

, accused the majority of “hijacking the districting process to pursue a goal that has no legitimate claim under our constitutional system: the proportional allocation of political power on the basis of race.”

These amendments renewed the V.R.A. for another twenty-five years, and voided a Supreme Court decision that would have made claimants prove that any discrimination against them was intentional. I am shocked to say I completely agree with Chief Justice Roberts here. What Alabama was suggesting would’ve completely derailed Section 2 from being an anti-discrimination statute. They were suggesting, at the most extreme level, that Section 2 is entirely unconstitutional and should not be applied at all.

My next question was going to be whether you were stunned by this decision and how you understood it in light of Roberts’s general skepticism of the V.R.A. But I think you’ve already answered—it sounds like you are stunned by the decision and you don’t totally understand it. What do you think is going on?

I am sure that, when Alabama drew this map, they drew it not caring for the fact that they were violating the current jurisprudence on Section 2, with the additional idea that they thought they had five votes on the Supreme Court that would support their interpretation. If you heard the oral argument, Justicesaid the case wasn’t a hard one. If you look at the Roberts opinion, there are several paragraphs where he said that the lower court applied everything normally.

Right. A number of cases were stayed while the lower courts awaited the Supreme Court’s decision. And so, now that they have seen that Section 2 applies in the regular way, they can go ahead and make their decisions. I think in many of the cases a lot of the evidence is already in. And so it won’t take a long time to end up with decisions.

So you’re saying that they didn’t have to take the Alabama case this year because the lower court essentially said that this is a violation of Section 2. The very fact that they took it made people think they were going to overturn it.

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