The Supreme Court Seems to Think Discrimination Is When You Try to Remedy Discrimination
The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court continues its run of nullifying constitutional rights by shadow docket, while insisting that it is doing no such thing.
On Monday, the Court blocked a ruling—written by a panel of three federal judges, two of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump—that found that Alabama had violated the Voting Rights Act when it drew a congressional map with one majority-Black district out of seven rather than two, in a state where Black people make up more than a quarter of the population. Five of the justices disagreed with the lower court’s decision, but only Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained his rationale in an opinion joined by Samuel Alito, arguing that complying with the Fifteenth Amendment would just be too much work.
“Running elections statewide is extraordinarily complicated and difficult. Those elections require enormous advance preparations by state and local officials, and pose significant logistical challenges,” Kavanaugh wrote. “The District Court’s order would require heroic efforts by those state and local authorities in the next few weeks—and even heroic efforts likely would not be enough to avoid chaos and confusion.”
[Adam Serwer: The culture war has warped the Supreme Court’s judgment]
The primary is in May and the general election is in November. As the, the Court has effectively redefined “close to an election” to apply to “all election cases,” making it virtually impossible to ever challenge racial gerrymanders that violate the Fifteenth Amendment’s protections against discriminatory voting practices before ballots are cast. If the justices were genuinely concerned about the time window, they could have pushed the start of early voting back from late March—a common solution in redistricting cases—but that wouldn’t have given Alabama Republicans the advantage they were demanding.
