SCOTUS Crowns ‘Good Week’ For The Rule Of Law By Gutting Racial Gerrymandering:
‘It’s been a good week’ for the rule of law, election law expert Hans von Spakovsky told The Federalist following Wednesday’s ruling.
It’s been a long week for the gerrymandering Democrats.
On Monday, attorneys representing Virginia Democrats’ absurdly gerrymandered rewrite of the commonwealth’s congressional maps faced some pointed questions from a skeptical-sounding Virginia Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, the high court denied a motion brought by Virginia Attorney General Jay “Two Bullets” Jones to appeal Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack “Chip” Hurley Jr.’s immediate ruling declaring unconstitutional last week’s referendum to change Virginia’s constitution. Voters narrowly approved a ballot question seeking to “temporarily” rip out a 2020 amendment that put political map-making in the hands of an independent commission — an inconvenient impediment to Democrats’ drive to change the current congressional maps to grab four more seats in Congress in the midterms. If all goes as the Dems planned, the new maps would give them a 10-1 advantage in Virginia’s congressional delegation.
Also on Tuesday, a three-judge panel dismissed a leftist lawfare group’s “novel” lawsuit seeking to rewrite Wisconsin’s congressional maps further to the Democratic Party’s advantage. The ruling marked the second rejection of the Democrats’ efforts to nix congressional maps drawn by the Red China-sounding People’s Maps Commission, handpicked by far-left Gov. Tony Evers. They have hopes a liberal-led Wisconsin Supreme Court will come to their rescue.
Luke Berg, deputy counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the Milwaukee-based law firm that successfully fought the lawsuit, called the lawsuit’s legal argument “novel” and “especially crazy.”
As Berg notes, there are uncompetitive districts everywhere. Madison and Milwaukee are massively uncompetitive state political districts for Republicans, for example.
“I searched nationwide for an anti-competitive gerrymander. I couldn’t find one,” Berg said in a phone interview this week with The Federalist. “They don’t cite one in their lawsuit. They don’t cite anything.”
But the most impactful decision arrived on Wednesday. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 bombshell ruling gutting the discriminatory practice of racial gerrymandering in the redistricting process. The 6-3 majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, found unconstitutional the twisting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by courts “to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.” --->READ MORE HERE
SCOTUS Ruling Against Race-Based Gerrymandering Reaffirms America’s Colorblind Constitution:
Self-government strengthens when it treats citizens as equals under the law, not as members of competing racial tribes.
All blacks apparently vote the same. It doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor, educated or unschooled, urban or rural — if they’re black, their voting patterns are only defined by their blackness. At least that’s what they were saying in Louisiana, until the latest U.S. Supreme Court decision pulled the curtain down on “majority-minority” gerrymandering.
In a clear 6-3 ruling this week, the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s SB8 map — which intentionally created a second majority-black congressional district — an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the court’s conservatives and with a strong concurrence from Justice Thomas (joined by Justice Gorsuch), held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not require the state to draw that extra district. Without such a requirement, there was no compelling interest to justify making race the predominant factor in map-drawing. The lower court’s decision striking the map was affirmed.
This decision directly attacks the racist stereotyping that has infected redistricting for too long. For decades, mapmakers have operated on the crude assumption that black voters (and Latino voters) form a monolithic bloc whose political preferences are dictated first and foremost, if not solely, by skin color. They have treated minority communities as predictable voting machines rather than as individuals with diverse views shaped by education, income, values, faith, and personal experience.
Louisiana’s mapmakers did exactly that: They sorted people into districts based on racial headcounts to engineer “majority-minority” outcomes, presuming that black voters would think and vote as a uniform group. Joe Biden even publicly chastised blacks as not being black if they didn’t vote Democrat.
That is the opposite of equality. It revives the very racial sorting the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause was written to stop. The Constitution demands that the government treat every person as an individual, not as a racial category. Yet Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as twisted in practice, has been used to mandate race-conscious districting that elevates group identity over individual dignity. It assumes black voters are interchangeable and that their interests can only be protected by carving out safe racial enclaves. This isn’t protecting voting rights; it’s enforcing a soft form of racial separatism dressed up as so-called social justice.
The Supreme Court rightly rejected that approach. By ruling that the VRA does not compel states to create additional majority-minority districts when race predominates without strict justification, the justices dismantled the legal machinery that turned racial stereotypes into map-drawing mandates. They refused to let the law be manipulated to enforce the fiction that all members of a racial group share identical political interests. As Justice Thomas has long argued, and as the majority reinforced this week, the Constitution is colorblind. It prohibits the government from dividing citizens by race to achieve predetermined electoral results. --->READ MORE HERE
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