The embattled Voting Rights Act is in trouble again — and it could soon take a serious hit.
Supreme Court Appears to be about to make using this landmark civil rights measure more difficult Forcing states to draw districts where minority candidates have a good chance of winning. A key provision that could be repealed next would allow private parties to sue under the 60-year-old law.
That would be a huge blow to civil rights attorneys like Mississippi’s Carol Rhoades, who has spent his career using the Voting Rights Act to empower blacks and other minorities politically.
“It’s become almost an impossible mountain to climb,” Rhodes told POLITICO.
Over the past decade or so, the VRA has suffered a series of blows from an increasingly conservative High Court. In 2013, Judge Repealing a key pillar of the law Eliminate “preclearance” requirements for early approval of voting changes, including redistricting, in most or all nine states and in a handful of localities.
The Supreme Court has been flooded with petitions in recent months that could lead judges to roll back the long-standing right of private groups and individuals to sue under the law. And, earlier this month, high court blockade The lower court’s Voting Rights Act ruling gave Texas the green light to redraw congressional maps at President Donald Trump’s request to give Republicans up to five additional House seats.
Despite these challenges, litigators like Rhodes have had great success utilizing the VRA. His lawsuit last month in Mississippi to force redistricting and special elections resulted in a victory for black Democrats Two extra seats at the state Capitol. The incremental growth breaks the Republican Party’s long-standing supermajority in the state, which has a black population of nearly 40%, the highest proportion in the country. If the Supreme Court rules against the law, these advances in minority representation could be halted.
I contacted Rhodes’ law firm in the small town of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, to ask him to assess the damage done to the VRA, the threats it currently faces, and how he seeks to use the law to advance minority power in his hometown.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Over the past few decades, the Voting Rights Act has received several major blows from the Supreme Court. Many lawyers now view it as teetering on the edge of irrelevance or incompetence. What is at stake in the pending case? Louisiana v. Calaisand can redistricting states sometimes use race to comply with the VRA?
Some people worry that the Voting Rights Act may be on the verge of being repealed, but I am an eternal optimist. Given that the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress under the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed everyone the right to vote on the basis of equality and not on the basis of race – I think that in Calle If they would resolve the issue in a favorable way [the law] Be insisted on.
Mississippi’s Voting Rights Act and the state Legislature had considerable success. Does this confuse the idea that the VRA is dying?
We have succeeded. Many civil rights groups and civil rights opponents have successfully used the Voting Rights Act to increase the number of black elected officials.
In Mississippi, whites, for the most part, would not vote for black candidates in contested elections, which is why the Voting Rights Act was so successful in creating majority-black districts.
When you have a large enough, concentrated enough minority population in those districts where they cannot elect the candidate of their choice – because the majority of the population always votes against the candidate of their choice – you have to redistrict in such a way that gives this large, geographically isolated minority the ability to elect representatives of their choice. The demographics of Mississippi make it easier for us to succeed here.
Does this have a concrete impact?
There was a time when there were 45 or 50 black people in the Mississippi Legislature elected from majority-black districts. The chairs of different committees, even very powerful committees, were all black. But what’s happened over the years is that more and more white Democrats are leaving the Democratic Party and switching to the Republican Party, so now you have a [GOP] An absolute majority in the Senate. We broke that at the last election.
When you break the supermajority in the Senate, money bills, especially taxes and spending, budgets, a lot of times it takes a supermajority to pass those bills. Without a supermajority, that means the Senate’s Republican leadership will have to negotiate with a majority of Black people elected as Democrats.
Are these legislators able to use this effective veto power to actually get some spending concessions like, “Are you going to spend in this part of the state or on these types of projects?”
We don’t know yet because the special election just took place and the Legislature comes back in January. So we’ll see if this cohesive group of black Democrats can get some concessions.
2013, Written by Chief Justice John Roberts shelby county Decidewhich ended the requirement that many states, including Mississippi, much of the South and some places in the North, submit any voting changes, including redistricting, to the Justice Department for approval. You successfully challenged in court the maps adopted by Mississippi in 2022, which were originally shelby county Decide?
They can do this directly because shelby countyYes. John Roberts was wrong. I agree with what Justice Ginsburg said at the time, it’s like standing under an umbrella and saying, “Oh, it’s not raining, so you can put the umbrella down.” That’s what the Roberts decision did: take the umbrella down. It’s raining everywhere.
After the next process is basically abandoned shelby countythe maps had to be submitted to Washington, which was done under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The maps you’re questioning, do you think President Obama’s Department of Justice will approve them? What about President George W. Bush’s Department of Justice or President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice?
The Trump Justice Department would approve them, but other presidents would not. I go back to Obama, Biden, Clinton, I even go back to Ronald Reagan. Oddly enough, Ronald Reagan initially opposed the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act, but ultimately signed it and considered it the crown jewel of American democracy. So the Trump Justice Department may be the only one that subverts the very purpose of the Voting Rights Act – to protect minority voters – to say it’s to protect white voters.
Roberts has been on the field for 22 years. For the first fifteen years or so, he was unanimously regarded as hostile to the enforcement of voting rights. This was seen as one of his animation problems. But in recent years, the court has taken a less positive approach to the Voting Rights Act in some rulings than some expected. Roberts seems to agree This current Calle The case was put on hold for a yearwhich essentially leaves these districts unchanged for the current election cycle. What’s wrong with Roberts? Do you think he has transformed or softened?
My personal opinion is that he was indeed a gradualist. He does not favor upending long-standing precedents and things the country has become accustomed to. He believed in incremental change and I think shelby county This decision was made because he sincerely believed that the field had advanced so much that these protections were no longer needed. I think after shelby county He found that these protective measures were still necessary. His views may be tempered. He may see the damage done shelby county Decision caused.
You’ve had four or five years to see how these things develop. How has technology changed the redistricting process? Does it make it easier for those who are trying to disempower minority voters to do that, and are people on your side able to leverage the technology in any similar way to counter those efforts?
When I first got into this, map drawers used maps and pencils, even before calculators and notepads were added. Then calculators, programming, and social science have also evolved over the years. Statistical analysis is becoming more sophisticated and the technology is becoming more sophisticated.
My take is that whoever writes the algorithm, whoever writes the code, the way the code is written can lead to more discrimination and make it harder to undo.
We do have people using technology, but in the Texas case, technology was used to gerrymander in a way that discriminated against black and Latino voters in Texas.
You were a teenager when many of the landmark civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s. Do you have any personal memories of what the segregated South was like? Have your relatives experienced some of the more bizarre tests that were used decades ago to exclude black people from voting, such as “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” or “How many jelly beans are in a jar?”
Oh yes. I was born in 1951. I grew up in a segregated neighborhood, went to an all-black high school, a segregated high school, a segregated elementary school. I remember going to the dentist. The dentist’s office has two entrances, one white and one “colored”, through the white side, which is air-conditioned. They have magazines. The “colored” side does not.
We took a field trip to the courthouse, which has both white and “colored” fountains. We had to sit on the balcony. I remember a field trip to the courthouse in third grade where we watched a trial where a white attorney defended a black man accused of a crime. He said, “This is a good Nigra” – NIGRA.
So I grew up with that, and I also remember my parents when the Voting Rights Act first passed, and they did have federal registrars around them, but all the neighbors, my parents and everybody not only went to register to vote, but they voted in every election no matter what.
Someone told us stories. Tim Winston, who owned a funeral home here and was one of the few black people who was able to register before the Voting Rights Act was passed, told the story of how they turned away black people by asking them ridiculous questions. So, yes, I personally remember the stories about how difficult it was before and after the Voting Rights Act was passed.
If Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is repealed and it’s no longer a tool available to you, what’s the strategy going forward? Does this mean civil rights organizations have no choice? What would the world be like if private parties were unable to sue through the VRA?
It became almost an impossible mountain to climb. You have to go back to the Fifteenth Amendment and prove intentional discrimination, which is hard, or go back to the Fourteenth Amendment and prove intentional discrimination, which is hard. All the Legislature has to do is say, “We’re not gerrymandering based on race. We’re gerrymandering based on partisanship, and they’re entitled to the presumption that there’s a good faith effort to do that, but it’s hard.” We have overwhelming evidence in Texas that partisanship is not the real cause. If this does not overcome the presumption that legislators acted in good faith, then it will be impossible to prove claims of racial injustice going forward.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the federal constitution places no limits on partisan gerrymandering, although justices continue to actively police the use of race in redistricting. Does this line make sense?
In Mississippi, there is no distinction between race and political party. This is fiction.