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\n Photo: Christian Monterrosa\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
The recent gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act<\/a> by the Supreme Court\u2019s conservative majority will injure American democracy in ways that go far beyond the outcome of this year\u2019s midterm elections.\u00a0And the damage will be felt in New York, where decades of discrimination and political trickery has long placed three of the five boroughs \u2014 Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx \u2014 under the same federal scrutiny of election practices as notorious states like Mississippi and Louisiana.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Voting Rights Act is arguably, in terms of our politics, the most important law Congress has ever passed, and the court has really made it pretty toothless,\u201d Professor Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School told me<\/a>. \u201cThe first moves that we should expect are the dismantling of majority-minority districts that had been built because of compliance with the Voting Rights Act. Some of that\u2019s already happened, for example in Florida<\/a>, and we can look forward to it happening probably in Louisiana and Alabama<\/a> and Mississippi<\/a>. Since that compliance is no longer necessary, those districts are very likely to be dismantled by Republican legislatures in southern states.\u201d<\/p>\n Until now, the VRA required state legislatures, mostly in the South, to comply with a broad \u201ctotality of circumstances\u201d test \u2014\u00a0 subject to review by the U.S. Department of Justice \u2014\u00a0 to ensure that state officials were not diluting the voting power of racial minorities. The law banned state legislatures and local boards of election from using literacy tests, poll taxes, burdensome registration requirements, and other forms of vote suppression. It also outlawed the practice of carving up Black communities into multiple, mostly white districts to minimize Black voting power, a practice called \u201ccracking.\u201d<\/p>\n But in Louisiana v. Callais, a majority of the Supreme Court explicitly eliminated the \u201ctotality of circumstances\u201d test. Voters who have been disempowered must now demonstrate in court that state lawmakers or local election officials are operating with a specific, provable intention to discriminate based on race, as opposed to race-neutral criteria like maximizing the number of Republican seats.<\/p>\n Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito argued that \u201cour Nation has made great strides in eliminating racial discrimination in voting. And if, as a result of this progress, it is hard to find pertinent evidence relating to intentional present-day voting discrimination, that is cause for celebration.\u201d<\/p>\n Alito\u2019s willful na\u00efvet\u00e9 was exposed as a sham within hours of the Callais decision. The nation got a first taste of what the new voting-rights system will look like as Republicans in Tennessee, which is about 17 percent Black, gleefully announced their intention to dismantle the sole Democratic congressional district in the state by carving up Memphis, which has one of the most concentrated Black populations (64 percent) of any big city in America, second only to Detroit.<\/p>\n \u201cA completely red Tennessee is VITAL to saving our Republic,\u201d Andy Ogles of Tennessee, a Republican congressman from Nashville, wrote on his Facebook page<\/a>, calling for a round of cracking. \u201cDRAW THEM OUT.\u201d Ogles is the same Neanderthal who made headlines earlier this year by suggesting on social media that the Justice Department should deport Mayor Zohran Mamdani<\/a> and by tweeting<\/a> \u201cMuslims don\u2019t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.\u201d<\/p>\n Under Alito\u2019s newly announced Supreme Court standard, power-hungry bigots like Ogles can now attack Black voting power with legal impunity by claiming their actions are based on a hunger for partisan power (\u201cDRAW THEM OUT\u201d) rather than their underlying bigotry (\u201cPluralism is a lie\u201d). The court is taking a big step backward: The entire purpose of the VRA was to outlaw the endless gamesmanship by local politicians bent on reducing or canceling minority voting rights.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is the rare legislature, as the history of voting discrimination shows, that cannot camouflage racial targeting with race-neutral justifications,\u201d Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a stinging dissent, predicting that the Callais decision has \u201claid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction.\u201d<\/p>\n Smug New Yorkers should not write these developments off as the ugly recrudescence of southern racism; the VRA has also been a way to control one generation after another of New York\u2019s homegrown political tricksters.<\/p>\n As recently as 2016, more than 100,000 registered New Yorkers were \u201cmistakenly\u201d purged from the city\u2019s voter rolls<\/a> in a way that disproportionately disenfranchised Latino voters. It was a reminder of past misdeeds like a 1989 purge of 300,000 voters<\/a>; an important 1958 case<\/a> brought by a Bronx Puerto Rican, Jose Camacho, that outlawed the printing of election materials in English only; and an ugly 1908<\/a> incident in which New Yorkers were required to reregister to vote every year, but registration was limited to Saturdays and a single Monday that happened to be Yom Kippur, a clear effort to disenfranchise Jewish voters.<\/p>\n A landmark 1967 case called Cooper v. Power<\/a> successfully used the VRA to undo New York\u2019s long-standing practice of cracking Bedford-Stuyvesant and other Central Brooklyn neighborhoods into multiple, mostly white congressional districts. The following year, a new court-ordered district consolidated Bed-Stuy and enabled Shirley Chisholm to become the first Black woman elected to Congress. (The plaintiff in the case, Andrew Cooper<\/a>, went on to publish a community newspaper, the City Sun<\/a>, where I got my first job in journalism.)<\/p>\n Demolition of the VRA means, among other things, that local Democratic operatives will be free to resume the tricks and traps of the past. In fact, Democrats are already vowing to fight the Callais decision by initiating a new round of gerrymandering. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, leader of the House Democrats, has reportedly begun looking into ways New York might create new Dem-leaning districts<\/a>. But the damage done by the Supreme Court\u2019s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in Callais goes far beyond flipping a few seats in this year\u2019s midterms.<\/p>\n The problem is not mere gerrymandering: The Supreme Court has all but blessed a broad, poisonous attack on the rights of minority communities nationwide. \u201cI will be interested to see, for example, whether time will vindicate the majority\u2019s view that the \u2018great strides\u2019 made in African American office-holding, \u2018particularly in the South,\u2019 will hold up after the issuance of this opinion,\u201d Justice Kagan predicted in her dissent. \u201cMy own guess is not.\u201d<\/p>\n Wholesale disenfranchisement of the sort Kagan warns about is very likely, and it\u2019s a fool\u2019s errand. This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement and six years since the killing of George Floyd triggered the biggest street demonstrations in U.S. history<\/a>. Those who think tens of millions of voters are going to quietly watch their rights get stripped away are in for a big noisy surprise.<\/p>\n