The Supreme Court Wants You to Believe Voting Rights Are Too Complicated. They’re Not – By Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) / February 15, 2022
On a recent episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick asked professor Franita Tolson to clear up any confusion about the Supreme Court’s shadow docket order in the case Merrill v. Milligan, which seems to have wiped out most remaining protections provided by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. As Tolson, who is vice dean for faculty and academic affairs and a professor of law at University of Southern California Gould School of Law, explains, Section 2 isn’t really all that complicated to assess; the conservative justices are just muddying the waters to reach their desired outcome. A portion of their conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, has been transcribed below.
Dahlia Lithwick: We’re going to turn to Merrill v. Milligan. This was a really crucial racial redistricting case under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, decided last week without much explanation on the court’s shadow docket, and it is enormously consequential. And it sometimes gets obscured because it’s buried under a statute and a redistricting order, and then again, under just a lack of any reasoning provided by the court. So thank God Franita Tolson is here.
I want to start by asking you to please explain literally decades of redistricting law and the Constitution standing on one foot. On the one hand, the Voting Rights Act requires states to draw districts where minority voters can elect their preferred candidates under certain conditions, but also, a jurisdiction cannot make race “the predominant factor” in redistricting without some compelling reason to do so.
