Why Two Supreme Court Conservatives Just Saved The Voting Rights Act – By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux (FiveThirtyEight) / June 8, 2023
This term, the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history had the opportunity to gut the last major section of the Voting Rights Act. They didn’t take it.
On Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices, ruling that Alabama’s congressional map likely violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices or procedures. Last year, a panel of three federal judges threw out Alabama’s map, which was drawn by the Republican-controlled state legislature in 2021 with only one majority-Black district out of seven, because it was possible to draw a second majority-Black seat in a state with a population that is more than one-quarter Black. Now, Alabama will have to redraw its map to include a second predominantly Black district.
Voting rights advocates were concerned that the Roberts court — which has a track record of narrowing the Voting Rights Act in most of the cases where the law has come up — would use the case as an opportunity to gut Section 2. Instead, 10 years after Roberts authored an opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act’s other major section, the chief justice wrote that while Section 2 “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States,” those concerns weren’t present in this case.
So what happened? Here are two theories for why Roberts and Kavanaugh delivered such a surprise — and what they mean for how we should think about the conservative majority going forward.
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