(By George Will, originally in the Washington Post, July 2) Sixty years ago this summer, Congress enacted the nation-transforming Voting Rights Act. Soon, however, Congress and a deferential Supreme Court, by reverse alchemy, turned the gold of the VRA into the lead of today’s racial distribution of representation. Last Friday, the Supreme Court delayed, pending reargument next term, deciding a case that could reverse the VRA’s tarnishment.
On the final day of the 2024-2025 term, the court issued 404 pages of decisions, concurrences and dissents in six cases. Singularly important, however, were the six pages of Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent from the court’s decision not to decide the case concerning the patent racial gerrymandering in Louisiana’s redistricting map.
Thomas cites the “intractable” conflict between the VRA as the court has construed it as a guarantee of the rights of groups, and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws for persons. “Intractable”? No, insoluble.
Approximately one-third of Louisianans are Black. After the 2020 Census, the legislature produced a congressional map with only one “majority-minority” district. In a complex process of litigation, the state, accepting the court-created principle of racial proportionality, created a second Black-majority district. The state simultaneously engaged in political gerrymandering to protect the seats of three senior Republican members of Congress. The result was unlovely.
The proposed 6th District resembles a 250-mile-long python uncoiling from northwest to southeast Louisiana to “scoop up” (Thomas’s tart phrase) enough Black voters, and exclude enough White ones, to be slightly more than 50 percent Black. Obviously, race predominated in producing this affront to the VRA’s original intent.
This is today’s judicial morass concerning redistricting: Race-consciousness is mandatory; race as “predominant” is forbidden. The path to this conundrum is explained in “Deconstructing the Republic,” the invaluable 2008 book by Anthony A. Peacock of Utah State University:
The original VRA was written to guarantee ballot access. But as subsequently construed by the court and amended by Congress, it confers group rights to “effective” representation. This entitlement to a portion of political power is determined by racial calculations….Peacock says, the ideology of multiculturalism changed politics by making race and ethnicity preeminent — and inevitably divisive — legal categories. This deconstructed the nation into an archipelago of racial and ethnic constituencies…. [For the rest of this column explaining why George Will disapproves of the overall redistricting morass, and disapproves of the Supreme Court punting the Louisiana case, follow this link.]
