Supreme Court Limits Voting Rights Act

rayiner

The article’s second sentence disproves its title: “Section 2 — a provision that broadly outlawed discrimination in voting on the basis of race.” Exactly. The purpose of the VRA is to ban racial discrimination in voting. That’s why the Supreme Court ruled that you can’t use race to draw district lines. You can’t try to create white majority districts because you think that’ll get white candidates elected. And for the same reason you can’t do that if you replace “white” with any other group. The article then conjures up a different purpose for the VRA: deliberately using race to increase the prospects of minorities being elected. The article concedes that was added as an interpretive gloss after the fact. But it condemns the Supreme Court for interpreting the VRA consistent with the law’s actual purpose instead of this other purpose that courts came up with after the fact. That’s what it means when it says the Court “limited” the VRA. It means that the Court limited the scope of the law with regards to this after-the-fact purpose. The civil rights laws prohibit treating individuals differently based on race. That’s what they say and that’s what they were trying to achieve. Unless expressly stated, they were not designed to be a remedial system that allowed racial discrimination so long as the people doing it purported to have good intentions.