Not long after the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing majority issued their April 29 ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case, dealing a death blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, several Republican party-controlled southern states rushed to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate Democratic seats and weaken black voting power. Louisiana lawmakers quickly moved to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-black congressional districts, where Gov. Jeff Landry suspended ongoing House primary elections. In Tennessee, the state legislature enacted a new map that eliminated the state’s only Democratic congressional seat. Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Florida, all former Confederate slave-holding states, also took action to extinguish black voters’ ability to elect candidates to represent their interests.
It’s estimated that the Supreme Court’s termination of the Voting Rights Act could cause 15 or more U.S. House districts now represented by black and Latino congressional representatives to be eliminated, while 200 Democratic-held state legislative seats — and more at the county and municipal level, would also likely be lost.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Dan Vicuña, senior policy director for voting and fair representation at Common Cause. Here he talks about the broader consequences of the high court’s ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case and the electoral reforms necessary to move the United States closer to achieving a true multiracial democracy.
DAN VICUÑA: Yeah. I mean, the court, because it was a constitutional ruling, made it difficult for “race forward, race conscious redistricting” to help empower communities of color to be enacted by federal law. But because it gave an out to discrimination as long as you claim partisan discrimination, what that says to me is that Congress needs to pass a ban on partisan gerrymandering nationwide. That’ll eliminate the out that’s going to allow legislatures to discriminate against communities of color. That’s going to be one fix.
We’ve seen a fix to get to institute independent, more community-led redistricting everywhere in the country that was also in the legislation that passed the House just a few years ago. So yeah, I think although it will be more difficult to go straight at the heart of race and redistricting, I do think there are solutions that Congress can enact to overcome this decision and bring back some fair representation to the halls of power around the country.
SCOTT HARRIS: Dan, there’s some other solutions that are being widely discussed and that is expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court or enforcing a retirement age for the current justices there. There’s also a lot of discussion nationally about implementing some kind of proportional representation for our congressional representatives. Instant runoff or ranked choice voting is another option that’s been widely discussed. I know we can’t get into the weeds on all these options, but what’s your view of some of these ideas out there?
DAN VICUÑA: Yeah. I mean, it’s very clear that this decision was a game changer in terms of ensuring fair representation for communities of color. The protections that were revolutionary in giving a voice to communities and ensuring that some of these bodies both in Congress, state legislatures, local government actually looked like and actually represented the communities in their districts—those are gone. And Callais was monumental in that awful project that the court’s been engaging in for a while now. I think we absolutely have to look at some real structural changes, like look closely at them. The court is broken. So absolutely looking at Supreme Court reform is something we’re trying to sort through right now.
Alternative ways to draw representation like proportional representation, which will look at sort of several members in one larger district to ensure that a minority community can get some sort of representation and a community of interest of all sorts, right? Both in terms of race, language minority, political party, but also all sorts of interests that bind a community together because of their needs.
So yeah, I mean, it’s time to really look at the playbook, maybe rewrite it in some ways and figure out how to fundamentally fix what’s turned into kind of a broken democracy.
For more information, visit Common Cause’s website at CommonCause.org.
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