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Jon Elswick\/AP<\/p>\n
FILE \u2013 The Supreme Court at sunset in Washington.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Wednesday decision<\/a> undermining the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act could have significant ramifications for Texas.<\/p>\n The case, Louisiana v. Callais, involved the state’s creation of a congressional district that would serve as the state’s second opportunity seat for African American voters. By a 6-to-3 decision, the high court ruled this constituted an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”<\/p>\n Writing for the court’s conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito said Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act \u2014 the provision that allowed enforcement of the act \u2014 didn’t bar states from using non-racial factors when drawing maps, including to achieve partisan advantage.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n “In short,” Alito wrote, “Section 2 imposes liability 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. Not only does this interpretation follow from the plain text of Section 2, but it is consistent with the limited authority that the Fifteenth Amendment confers.”<\/p>\n Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, said the ruling “renders section 2 all but a dead letter.”<\/p>\n Skip to PDF content<\/a><\/p>\n Valencia Richardson, senior legal counsel for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, used a different analogy.<\/p>\n “I think it\u2019s safe to say that the Callais decision has just run a truck through Section 2 when it comes to vote dilution claims,” Richardson said. “The folks brought this case in the hopes of destroying what was left of the Voting Rights Act. And what they\u2019ve done has dealt a fundamental blow to the achievement of our multiracial democracy.”<\/p>\n The Callais ruling makes it much harder to obtain any redress of racial discrimination in redistricting through the courts.<\/p>\n “You would have to show a smoking gun of intentional discrimination. Something as egregious as legislators saying, \u2018I hate Black voters,’ [or] something as egregious as, like, \u2018I don\u2019t want Latino voters in my district,’\u201d said Sarah Chen, senior supervising attorney for voting rights at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “And even that might not be enough given how the other ways that the Supreme Court is trying to completely alter the Voting Rights Act beyond recognition.”<\/p>\n While Alito claimed the ruling allowed Section 2 to stand, in modified form, David Froomkin, a constitutional law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, argued the decision effectively overturned 40 years of jurisprudence on voting rights.<\/p>\n “I think it\u2019s hard to overstate how seismic this change is going to be,” Froomkin said. “I expect that states across the South will respond by eliminating minority opportunity congressional districts \u2014 for example, Louisiana, the subject of this particular case, but also states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.”<\/p>\n Before the end of the day Wednesday, Florida<\/a> lawmakers approved a new congressional map aimed at flipping four Democratic House seats to the Republican column.<\/p>\n