The U.S. Supreme Court will hear new arguments in a voting rights case after they were unable to reach an agreement on the issue in its previous session.
The court's conservative majority surprisingly preserved the 1965 Voting Rights Act and race-based remedies two years ago, wrote CNN's Joan Biskupic. But the justices have sent new signals that they could be on the verge of rolling back the landmark civil rights law intended to rectify centuries of racial discrimination.
"The controversy was originally heard last March, but the justices could not resolve it by the end of June when the 2024-2025 session ended," wrote Biskupic, who has covered the court since 1989.
"Rarely do the justices order new arguments. But when they do, they’ve been known to rule far more consequentially, as in the 2010 Citizens United case when the re-argument led to a decision giving corporations and labor unions new First Amendment rights to pump money into elections."
The law's cure for discriminatory congressional maps will be tested in a Louisiana case, and the court announced in August that the legal question would be expanded to decide whether the act's race-based remedies violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. The decision could affect races across the country in next year's midterm elections.
“In southern states, for example, which are Republican dominated, they haven’t been able to make every congressional district a likely Republican district because of the obligation to create Voting Rights Act districts (with Black majorities) in those states,” said election law expert Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University.
“If the court dramatically weakened Section 2, it could be easier for states to do away with those districts and make their congressional districts more Republican,” he added.
The conservative majority entrenched by President Donald Trump has already gutted other remedies to historic racial discrimination, and at least two justices have gone on record to question the continued need for the Voting Rights Act's protections.
"During the first round of arguments in the Louisiana case over the VRA’s Section 2, which prohibits practices that give racial minorities less opportunity than Whites to elect their preferred candidates, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that it may be time similarly to scale back the remedies of that section," Biskupic wrote.
"[Kavanaugh] raised the possibility of 'durational' limits, noting that in the context of school integration and university admissions, the court has ruled that 'the authority of a state to engage in race-based remedial action must have a logical end point, must be limited in time, must be a temporary matter,'" the correspondent added.
Justice Clarence Thomas has been even more critical of Section 2, and he dissented from the order in June announcing new arguments in the Louisiana v. Callais case because he wanted no delay in a resolution that would strike down its remedies as unconstitutional.
“I am hopeful,” Thomas wrote at the time, “that this Court will soon realize that the conflict its Section 2 jurisprudence has sown with the Constitution is too severe to ignore.”
