Supreme Court Rules in Lockstep with Trump Admin's Vision of a Whiter America
The Supreme Court exposed the grisly underpinning of the Trump administration Wednesday as it ruled to subordinate minority voters to white ones, and seemed ready to allow the government to summarily end protected status for endangered refugees.
The administration is an amicus supporting Louisiana in Louisiana v. Callais — a landmark ruling in which the Supreme Court made the Voting Rights Act dead letter — and the petitioner in the consolidated cases Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s abrupt ending of the temporary protective status of Haitian and Syrian refugees.
In Callais, the Court’s right wing reinstated a discriminatory intent test that in the past had made the VRA so unusable that Congress intervened, clarifying in the 1982 amendments that legislative and congressional maps only had to have a discriminatory effect to be unlawful. Bucking that legislative history, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that plaintiffs could now only succeed with Section 2 claims by completely disentangling voters’ race from their political preferences — an impossibility in the South particularly, with its racially polarized voting. Their alternative option, he wrote, would be to draw a map that preserved Republican gerrymanders while also somehow giving minority voters increased representation.
The ruling could return the country to a pre-VRA status quo, where Black voters, particularly in the South, were carefully sorted into districts so their preferences would be swamped by those of the white voters. This disenfranchisement also had the knock-on effect of robbing huge swaths of the country of minority representatives.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/supreme-court-rules-lockstep-trump-203743541.html
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