All posts tagged "Voting Rights Act"

The United States is on the path to becoming more like an apartheid state, a legal expert warned, as he saw a recent decision by the Supreme Court as validating racism.

"The effect of what the Supreme Court has done is that we are going to look more and more like apartheid South Africa," lawyer and legal commentator Andrew Weissmann said on a podcast for All Rise News on Friday. Weissmann was talking about the Louisiana v Callais decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act's protections for minority voters.

"It is happening in the context of an administration that in my lifetime is the most directly and overtly racist administration," Weissmann continued, adding that the decision is "part of a complete plan by the Supreme Court and the Chief Justice to do away with protections where it is George Orwell-like, where efforts to eradicate racial discrimination are being torn away." ...

MAGA strategist Steve Bannon asserted that a law empowering Black voters had "oppressed" Southern states since the days of the Civil Rights movement.

During his Friday War Room broadcast, Bannon reacted to the Supreme Court's decision that rolled back Voting Rights Act protections for Black and Latino voters. The ruling effectively gutted the law by declaring majority-minority districts to be unconstitutional and paved the way for additional white Republican representatives in the South, something he argued the GOP would need to retain its majority and control of Congress.

"We're not gonna hold the House without this," the MAGA influencer noted. "Let me just be blunt. That's why this fight's so important."...

If the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in a high-profile redistricting case within the next few weeks — likely weakening the Voting Rights Act, as experts anticipate — Republicans are poised to gerrymander as many as eight House seats in their favor ahead of November’s midterms, a nonpartisan political reform group warns in a new report.

Long-term effects could be more drastic, resulting in 15 or more districts gerrymandered to benefit the GOP in 2028, if the Supreme Court weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, according to Issue One.

The Court heard oral arguments in the case involving racial gerrymandering in Louisiana late last year and could issue a decision anytime between now and June. ...

Two American university professors Friday warned the "noxious" Supreme Court can no longer be saved.

Harvard law professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale law professor Samuel Moyn wrote an opinion piece published by The Guardian about how the high court's legitimacy has been increasingly damaged under President Donald Trump's second term. Conservative justices have handed Trump and the MAGA movement a number of wins, including overturning of Roe v. Wade, "what remains of the Voting Rights Act," and losing its "nonpartisan image."

The role of the court has shifted and with the conservative majority, the liberal justices had previously "proceeded as if their conservative peers would continue to take their own institution’s legitimacy seriously." ...

An analyst warned Tuesday that it's now time for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to stand up to President Donald Trump.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, journalist Steven Greenhouse argued that Roberts has "spearheaded a rightwing judicial revolution that took a wrecking ball to many precedents, laws and institutions. Some have called him the worst chief justice since Roger Taney, who wrote the horrific Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that enslaved Black people couldn’t be citizens."

The high court — and Roberts specifically — have given Trump even more power, he wrote....

When law professor Seth Chandler asked artificial intelligence to predict how the Supreme Court would rule in Trump v. CASA this summer, he won a $1 bet with a colleague. The AI-generated draft opinion proved “exactly right” about the 6-3 conservative majority ruling that limited universal injunctions in response to President Donald Trump's executive order curtailing birthright citizenship.

That might not seem too surprising — the court to which Trump appointed three justices has generally proved favorable to the president’s draconian policies, after all. Nonetheless, when the court heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Chandler, who specializes in constitutional law and computer science at the University of Houston, turned to AI again.

He asked Google Gemini to draft an opinion for the redistricting case. Once again, the AI assistant predicted a 6-3 ruling, the conservatives sticking together. ...