The Voting Rights Act is dead. Long live the Voting Rights Act.
This week, the US Supreme Court did what we thought they would do in an enormous redistricting case out of Louisiana. They dismantled the federal standard for protecting Black voters in America.
We will all feel it, especially in Southern states like North Carolina.
At a moment in which the political parties are hurtling into an all-out gerrymandering arms race, carving up states like a Thanksgiving turkey, the conservative majority on the nation’s high court thought we had too many protections.
Created to drag the South out of the “Jim Crow” era, the Voting Rights Act is perhaps the most important law of the 20th century. It said that America would no longer tolerate the tactics that all but eliminated Black people from the political process in Southern states like North Carolina.
As voting rights expert Sherrilyn Ifill told the Associated Press, there were about 1,500 Black elected officials in the US in 1970. There are more than 10,000 today, and she credits the Voting Rights Act.
“It isn’t because of the goodness of people’s hearts,” she told the AP.
At a moment in which the political parties are hurtling into an all-out gerrymandering arms race, carving up states like a Thanksgiving turkey, the conservative majority on the nation’s high court thought we had too many protections.
Why the Voting Rights Act was necessary
Before the VRA, here’s what white supremacists did:
Faced with large numbers of Black voters in Southern communities, politicians either made it difficult for those Black folks to vote or they manipulated the voting districts, packing Black voters into fewer districts or spreading them out so their influence was diminished.
Either way, Black political power was squashed.
Today’s conservative justices on the US Supreme Court—and many conservative Americans—have said for years that such protections are no longer necessary, that we’re a “new” people.
If they are truly so blind to reality, they need only watch what happens next.
As we speak, politicians are preparing to draw new maps, freed from the encumbrance of having to worry about whether their voting districts are too racist or not.
Louisiana, where this case originated, has paused its primaries and plans to draw a new map, the state’s Republican governor has said.
Other states will follow.
If they win control of one or both chambers this fall, the pressure will be on the Democrats to be the adults in the room and reform our sick electoral system.
And when they push Black and brown leaders out of office, all they’ll need to do is say they were doing it for “partisan” reasons. The courts will be powerless to intervene.
What happened at the US Supreme Court will affect the maps in one Southern state after another, including here in North Carolina. It will affect races from Congress to your local school board.
But it is not the end of the road.
What needs to happen next
In 2022, Democratic lawmakers in Congress and the Senate fell just a couple votes short of a crucial update to the Voting Rights Act.
Named for John Lewis—one of the leaders of the Selma, Alabama, marches that ignited the Voting Rights Act—the proposed legislation revives one of the VRA’s most important components: It requires states with a recent history of voting rights violations get federal preclearance before they can pass laws or voting maps that restrict minority voters.
This fall, if American voters give Democrats control over the US House and Senate, they’ll need to finish the deal this time.
That’s not all that needs to happen.
Congress has the power to write new laws restricting gerrymandering. It’s become an epidemic of sorts, with Republican and Democratic states jostling to redraw their maps and pick up more seats for their party.
North Carolina lawmakers joined in last year at President Donald Trump’s bidding. Virginia voters, like those in California, passed a referendum to help Democrats gerrymander in response (though that was temporarily blocked). Now Republicans in Florida have passed their own rigged maps.
One big difference between the parties—aside from the blind obedience to Trump—is that Democrats put the gerrymandering before the voters. I don’t recall Republicans asking voters in North Carolina or Texas or Florida how we felt.
The one winner in all this is partisanship. The loser is the people.
If they win control of one or both chambers this fall, the pressure will be on the Democrats to be the adults in the room and reform our sick electoral system.
Of course, it’s an option for Republicans too, but for the foreseeable future, the GOP won’t do anything unless Trump wants it.
The courts and the political parties made this mess, but the American voters can fix it.
