Legal analyst Elie Mystal took a dim view on Wednesday following the Supreme Court’s move to weaken the Voting Rights Act’s ability to police racial gerrymandering — and, writing for The Nation, gave Democrats a window of just four years to prevent the ruling from causing an absolute crisis.
“The VRA was the first piece of legislation that seriously tried to change this, to ensure every citizen the ability to participate in democratic self-government,” wrote Mystal. “It did this by enforcing the 15th and 9th Amendments and their prohibitions on denying the vote on account of race or gender.”
“Remember, constitutional amendments mean nothing if there is no legislation to support them,” he continued. “Nobody, for instance, went to jail for having a beer in violation of the18th Amendment’s prohibition on alcohol; instead, people went to jail for violating the Volstead Act (which attempted to enforce the 18th Amendment in the most draconian and stupid way possible). Similarly, every Black person alive in the South between 1865 and 1965 could tell you that nobody got to vote because of the 15th Amendment. Black people got to vote because of the Voting Rights Act.”
Under the new ruling in Callais v. Louisiana, the right-wing justices technically left Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act functional, but added harsh and often conflicting new requirements to legal tests for racial gerrymanders, which some experts fear could effectively make it defunct.
Democrats are now on the clock, he warned — they have four years to win back power and fix this, before the next Census gives Republicans power to nuke far more majority-minority districts.
“If Democrats take back the House and the Senate, kill the filibuster, and elect a Democratic president in 2028, Congress can pack the court and fill it with people who do not believe in a white’s-only theory of voting rights,” he wrote. “Those new justices could overrule not just Callais, but all of the other voting rights cases the Roberts court has issued to try to destroy minority voting rights. Those new justices could overturn the court’s prior gerrymandering decisions. A new court could reject the white supremacy the Roberts court embraces.”
“The Voting Rights Act is dead. We need a new one, or the racists win. It’s as simple and as depressing as that,” he concluded.
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