SCOTUS Narrows the Reach of the Voting Rights Act

Greetings and welcome to the latest edition of the Injustice System newsletter. The U.S. Supreme Court issued not one but two significant decisions yesterday. Let’s take them in turn.

In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6–3 Court, divided along partisan lines, invalidated a majority-black congressional district as an illegal gerrymander that unconstitutionally sorted voters by race.

The dispute originated in 2022 when a group of voters challenged a new Louisiana congressional map, arguing that it violated the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting. A federal judge agreed, so Louisiana added a new majority-black district to its congressional map to comply with the judge’s ruling. A different group of voters, however, then challenged that new majority-black district, arguing that it was an illegal racial gerrymander.

Writing yesterday for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that the initial 2022 ruling by the lower court amounted to an impermissible misreading of the Voting Rights Act. According to Alito, that act should come into play “only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” And the original 2022 challenge to the Louisiana map, Alito argued, “would have failed to show an objective likelihood of intentional discrimination based on the totality of circumstances.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Elena Kagan offered a different vision of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that Congress, under its power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment’s right to vote, can and should be able to “prohibit electoral schemes based on their vote-diluting effects, regardless whether a State could offer up some race-neutral explanation.”

In other words, while Alito emphasized the importance of identifying “intentionally” discriminatory state action, Kagan stressed that “even race-neutral [state] actions could perpetuate purposeful racial discrimination.” The triumph of the Alito view over the Kagan view means that the Voting Rights Act will now have a very limited role to play in all such redistricting cases going forward.

Yesterday’s second notable Supreme Court decision came in the matter of First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport. In 2023, the office of New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin issued a subpoena demanding the identities of the financial donors to First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a religious nonprofit that provides anti-abortion pregnancy counseling. First Choice then went to federal court, arguing that the subpoena would scare away donors and thus violate its free association rights under the First Amendment.

But the federal district court dismissed the group’s complaint, holding that the subpoena alone did not count as a cognizable legal injury that would give First Choice the requisite legal standing needed to file suit in federal court.

Writing yesterday for a unanimous Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected that lower court holding. “An injury in fact does not arise only when a defendant causes a tangible harm to a plaintiff, like a physical injury or monetary loss. It can also arise when a defendant burdens a plaintiff ‘s constitutional rights.” And “our cases,” Gorsuch wrote, “have long recognized that demands for a charity’s private member or donor information have just that effect. They ‘discourag[e]’ people from associating with groups engaged in protected First Amendment advocacy.” And because First Choice suffered a constitutional burden of that very sort, Gorsuch concluded, its First Amendment lawsuit against the state official was now free to proceed in federal court.

It might be tempting to view this decision as a kind of conservative outcome, since it did, after all, involve a Democratic political figure losing to a religious group that’s opposed to abortion. But the logic of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision will reach far beyond the parties to this particular case. Any group—from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the National Rifle Association—with a message that might be unpopular with some government official will now benefit from this emphatic reaffirmation of the right to freedom of association.