Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday compared efforts to draw congressional districts along racial lines to the way disabled people were granted easier access to buildings after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law.
“The idea in Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system, right?” Jackson said, as she questioned a lawyer representing Louisiana voters who argued the court-ordered creation of a second majority-black district in the state violated the 14th Amendment by prioritizing racial composition in its boundaries.
“They’re disabled,” the justice said of minority voters in the state.
Jackson noted that the majority opinion in a 2023 Supreme Court ruling — which found Alabama unlawfully diluted the voting power of black people in the state — “used the word ‘disabled’” to describe voters subject to “processes [that] are not equally open.”
“What Congress is saying is if it is happening, which Section 2 gives us the tools to determine, you’ve got to fix it,” she argued.
Louisiana’s original map following the 2020 census included only one majority-black district, but lower courts ordered officials to redraw congressional boundaries, finding that the map violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
About one-third of Louisiana residents are black and the state’s only two Democratic lawmakers in Congress were elected from the majority-black districts.
“[M]y kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA,” Jackson said, comparing the remedy mandated by the courts to the landmark civil rights law passed by Congress in 1990.
“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities, and so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings,” the justice explained.
“And it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building or the person who owned the building intended for them to be exclusionary. That’s irrelevant. Congress said the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities if readily possible.”
“I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here.”
Garrett Greim, the attorney for the plaintiffs, responded by arguing that the court-ordered remedy for Louisiana to comply with the Voting Rights Act inappropriately makes stereotypical assumptions about minority voters.
“The difference is that the remedy under the ADA and other antidiscrimination laws is not stereotyping,” Greim said.
“It’s not race-based. I take your point. I take your point,” Jackson acknowledged. “But you’re saying then that if the problem of no access is about race, it’s just too bad because you can’t have a remedy that relates to race.”
Greim shot back: “Absolutely not … It’s whether the remedy that relates to race involves stereotyping voters and making assumptions about their politics and their views and their thoughts based on their race.”
“And that’s the problem. It doesn’t exist in those other civil rights statutes.”
Throughout the oral arguments, the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices indicated that they would limit the use of race to determine the boundaries of congressional districts.
A decision in the case is expected by June of next year.
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