They must also show that these voters are “politically cohesive,” meaning that they tend to vote together for the same candidates, and that the state’s white voters also tend to vote “sufficiently as a bloc to enable it. Plaintiffs seeking an additional Black majority district, for example, must show that there are enough Black voters, living in a sufficiently geographically “compact” area, that such a district could plausibly be drawn. The lower court found that Milligan involved such a clear-cut violation of the Voting Rights Act that “we do not regard the question whether the Milligan plaintiffs are substantially likely to prevail on the merits of their claim as a close one.”Īs Roberts explains in his Milligan opinion, Gingles requires voting rights plaintiffs to clear several hurdles before their case can proceed. Gingles (1986), this Alabama map could not stand. Last year, a three-judge panel that included two Trump appointees agreed, releasing a 225-page opinion explaining why, under the framework the Supreme Court laid out in Thornburg v. Several Alabama voters, including a state senator, challenged this law, arguing it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids states from enacting an election law that “ results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” As a practical matter, that meant that only 14 percent of the state’s delegation to the US House of Representatives would be chosen by Black voters, even though African Americans make up about 27 percent of the state’s population. Milligan involved a racially gerrymandered congressional map in Alabama, which gave Black voters a majority in just one of the state’s seven districts. It is also the current Court’s first suggestion that its crusade against the Voting Rights Act may have limits. Given this history, when this Voting Rights Act concerning Alabama’s congressional maps came onto the Court’s docket, it was reasonable to expect the justices to apply similarly results-driven reasoning - inventing new limits on voting rights at will, without any regard to precedent or statutory or constitutional text.Īnd yet, Roberts’s opinion in Milligan is as much a celebration of stare decisis, the principle that courts should be reluctant to discard precedent, as it is a rebuke to Alabama’s attempt to effectively legalize racial gerrymandering. DNC (2021), the Court invented a slew of additional limits on the Act that appear nowhere in the law’s text, such as a presumption that voting restrictions that were commonplace in 1982 are lawful. Holder (2013), for example, the Court simply made up a new constitutional principle - the so-called “‘fundamental principle of equal sovereignty’ among the States” - and relied on this newly fabricated idea to neutralize the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of racist election practices to “preclear” any new election laws with federal officials. It’s supposed to be highly unusual for a court to turn its back on one of its own precedents.īut this is the Roberts Court we are talking about here, a Court that, especially after former President Donald Trump remade its membership, has been extraordinarily willing to toss out seminal precedents - and to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. Of course, the idea that a court should follow precedent isn’t supposed to be controversial. Roberts’s opinion was joined in full by all three of the liberal justices, and was joined almost entirely in full by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our jurisprudence anew.” ![]() As Roberts writes in a particularly pointed swipe at those lawyers, “the heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Supreme Court repeatedly chastises Alabama’s lawyers for their aggressive efforts to rewrite longstanding law in order to render much of what remains of the Voting Rights Act an empty husk. Milligan that preserves longstanding safeguards against racism in US elections, strikes down a gerrymandered congressional map in Alabama, and all but assures that Democrats will gain at least one congressional seat in the next election from that state. ![]() It handed down a 5-4 decision in Allen v. The Supreme Court did something genuinely shocking on Thursday.
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