Editors at National Review Online call for the U.S. Supreme Court to take significant action in redistricting litigation.
Sixty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, more than a dozen congressional districts as well as many state legislative districts are drawn along openly racial lines for the explicit purpose of separating voters into racial enclaves. The Supreme Court should bring an end to this era of race discrimination in our democracy, which was the product of misconceived judicial activism and bureaucratic overreaching. We do not need racial gerrymandering to target a problem that recedes ever further into our past.
Nothing in the Constitution requires this. To the contrary, as the Court has warned for decades, using race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines violates the 14th and 15th Amendments’ guarantees of equal protection and freedom from race discrimination in voting rights.
Neither has Congress ever enacted a requirement for racially set-aside districts. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as amended in 1982, cautions courts that “nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” …
… Section 2 never even mentions the drawing of district lines. It asks instead whether a state’s “political processes leading to nomination or election . . . are not equally open to participation”by members of racial groups who “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” As Alito wrote for the Court four years ago in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), “equal openness remains the touchstone” of Section 2. In reality, every state’s political system today is equally open, even if the outcomes of elections are often a disappointment to voters outside of the partisan majority.
