The court's ‘originalism' looks a lot like racism
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A new map was then drawn creating two Black 'opportunity districts,' each with enough of a critical mass of Black voters to allow them to elect the candidate of their choice.
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new
map violated the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against them.
They claim that the use of race in the map drawing violates the VRA. And now they will get the chance to further argue that the map is also unconstitutional, flouting the directives of Reconstruction-era amendments.
Here's the problem with that argument: It directly contradicts what the framers who introduced the 14th Amendment said about it.
This was a point that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson eloquently made during oral arguments in 2022 in the case
'I looked at the report that was submitted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the 14th Amendment, and that report says that the entire point of the Amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves,'
The framer Jackson cited, Thaddeus Stevens, was quite emphatic of this point
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'There is more reason why colored voters should be admitted in the rebel States than in the Territories,'
That is exactly why the Voting Rights Act was passed nearly a century after Stevens's death. Southern states have continued the long history of targeting Black voters with suppressive laws and practices. As Stevens, and later Jackson, point out, stopping it requires not only acknowledging the role race plays but also empowering those enforcing the law to consider race, because you can't fight what you can't name.
But the Supreme Court's majority could be on the verge of ignoring the very constitutional originalism it claims to embrace. As in Shelby County and its
That's not originalism. That is institutionalized racism in action.
This is an excerpt from
, a newsletter about the Supreme Court from columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr.
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Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at
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