The Supreme Court Just Gutted the Voting Rights Act - 61 Years After Bloody Sunday

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act today in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, 61 years after police beat John Lewis and 600 civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for trying to register to vote. Section 2 of the VRA has protected minority voters for 60 years by prohibiting election maps that dilute minority political power even without proof of intentional discrimination. Alito just changed that standard. Now you have to prove intentional discrimination, which voting rights groups say makes cases all but impossible to win because lawmakers don’t write down that they’re doing racism. Louisiana has one majority-Black congressional district despite Black voters making up more than a third of the state’s voting age population. Courts ordered a second. Alito said drawing that district violated the rights of white voters under the Equal Protection Clause. Republicans can now redraw majority-minority districts across the South before November’s midterms. Black Democrats across the South could lose their seats. Justice Elena Kagan filed a 48-page dissent and read it aloud from the bench - something justices almost never do, reserved for when they need the country to hear it in their voice. She called this the court’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act. She closed by saying “I dissent” four times. The White House called it a complete and total victory for American voters. Just not Black ones. Sixty-one years. One decision. Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe