蘑菇视频

Jun 15, 2023 By George Will 4 min read

In a 2006 case about racial calculations in redistricting, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Now he has written the opinion for a divided 5-4 Supreme Court holding that Alabama’s redistricting after the 2020 Census did not do enough divvying.

Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), as amended in 1982, proscribes any voting arrangement that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen . . . to vote on account of race.” Courts, prodded by groups intent on maximizing race-conscious policies and minimizing colorblindness as a social aspiration, have radically rewritten this. They have changed the right to vote into an entitlement to arrangements that make likely particular election results.

Last week, the Supreme Court preserved this perversion of the law. It affirmed that the Voting Rights Act protects Black voters against the “dilution” of their power to achieve their preferred (presumably racial) election outcomes. The court said Black Alabamians are entitled to a second district configured to increase the probability of success by Black candidates.

Alabama, whose population is 26.8 percent Black, has since 1973 had seven congressional districts, and no significant change in the Black portion of the state’s population. In 2021, the legislature approved a map with six White-majority districts and one Black-majority district. The map is similar to those approved by federal courts and the Justice Department after the 2000 and 2010 censuses.

The plaintiffs in Thursday’s case propose an oddly configured second Black district extending the width of the state, sweeping in majority Black precincts here and there. It obviously aims for a racial outcome.

The Voting Rights Act was written to end voting measures involving racial discrimination; since 1986, the court has required such measures. This, even though Section 2 says that nothing in it “establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion of the population.” Enacted in 1965, the law proscribed racist state practices. It originally guaranteed equal access to ballots, and equality in the right “to participate in the political process” (emphasis added). But identity politics influenced courts’ construing of the VRA.

It has been wielded as a guarantee not of individuals’ rights but of the rights of racial groups that are presumed to think monolithically. In 1980, the court held that Section 2 prohibits only “intentionally discriminatory” government action. So, in 1982 Congress prohibited action that, regardless of intent, has a discriminatory “result.” Next, in a judge-created gloss on the 1982 amendment, the VRA was said to guarantee a “meaningful vote” – one conducive to producing a racial group’s presumed preference for representation by members of the group.

In 1986, the court essentially instructed state legislatures to maximize “majority-minority” districts, and to tactically segregate Black voters to enlarge their power as voting blocs in other districts. This codified the principle of “categorical representation”: Representative government requires the representation of categories of people that look alike and, presumably, think alike.

This policy is, strictly speaking, racialist. Infused by it, the VRA became, effectively, the VPA, guaranteeing not rights but power – the “undiluted” power of government-favored groups: originally Blacks, then some others.

Last week, the court should have heeded the amicus brief submitted by the Project on Fair Representation, which opposes government actions based on racial and ethnic classifications because they increase “polarized and racialized politics.” Courts have turned the VRA inside out. They have construed it to require “not merely race-consciousness to achieve the ‘right’ kind of open racial politics, whatever that may mean, but a prioritization of race above every other criterion to achieve the proportional representation of different racial groups.”

The project’s brief noted that the court has hitherto said racial classifications foment race-based reasoning, and exacerbate conflicts by defining the nation as permanently divided into indissoluble racial blocs. So said Roberts in a 2006 dissent, which contained his pungent remark quoted in paragraph one above.

Roberts, in last week’s decision, correctly described it as consistent with precedents. But being consistent with incoherence is no virtue. After the decision, progressives paused their denunciations of what they call the “imperial” court. Switching gears, they praised its imperious rewriting of the Voting Rights Act. They ignored the fact that its authentic purpose was simply to end racial discrimination in voting rules.

With its new ruling, the court has again reaffirmed the federal judiciary’s repudiation of colorblind law. And the court lubricated today’s slide into incessant obsessing about race. This is a sordid business.

George Will is a columnist for The Washington Post.