Mother Jones illustration; Beata Zawrzel/Zuma; National Archives, Getty
On July 24, US Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Latina Democrat from Houston, traveled to Austin to testify before the Texas House against the mid-decade congressional redistricting plan pushed by Donald Trump that was designed to give Republicans five new seats in the US House. Garcia said Republicans were motivated not just by political expediency, but by a broader desire to weaken the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which prohibits electoral changes that discriminate against voters of color.
“The short-term game is getting five seats to retain the gavel of the House,” Garcia told members of the special committee on redistricting. “That’s the power grab. The long-term game is to repeal the Voting Rights Act.”
Texas has a long history of violating the VRA. The state’s current congressional redistricting map, adopted in 2021, is being challenged in court by civil rights groups, who note that 95 percent of the state’s population growth over the past decade came from people of color, but the state drew two new seats in areas with white majorities instead.
“They’re trying to take away the last tool the Supreme Court has not fully dissolved to stop the gross manipulation of elections.”
The Trump-inspired new map unveiled by Texas Republicans last week worsens that skew in representation by further increasing the number of congressional districts with white majorities and dismantling seats held by minority representatives, including Reps. Al Green in Houston and Greg Casar in Austin. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed the maps needed to be redrawn because of a Department of Justice letter alleging that four districts in the state, all represented by Black or Hispanic Democrats, were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”
“They are thumbing their noses at the Voting Rights Act,” former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder told me.
The VRA, which turns 60 on Wednesday, is widely regarded as the country’s most important civil rights law. It played a pivotal role in ending Jim Crow by eliminating the suppressive tactics, like literacy tests and poll taxes, that disenfranchised Black Americans in the segregated South. When he signed the law at the US Capitol on August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson called it “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.”
The results were almost unimaginable in 1965. Because of the law, the number of Black registered voters in the South increased from 31 percent to 73 percent; the number of Black elected officials rose from fewer than 500 to 10,500 nationwide; and the number of Black members of Congress grew from 5 to 60. The four congressional reauthorizations of the VRA lowered the voting age to 18, eliminated literacy tests nationwide, and expanded protections for language-minority groups like Hispanics in Texas, Asian-Americans in New York, and Native Americans in Arizona. The VRA became the prime vehicle for expanding voting rights for all Americans.
But today the law is a “shadow of its former self,” says Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It is being attacked from every angle, gravely weakened by a series of hostile court decisions and under sustained fire from Republicans at the state and federal level.
The imminent threat to the VRA was brought into sharp relief last Friday, as the Texas House prepared to pass Trump’s mid-decade gerrymander, when the US Supreme Court announced new legal briefings in a Louisiana redistricting case to decide “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
That raises the prospect that the court’s conservative majority could rule next year that districts drawn to comply with the VRA that give people of color the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates may be unconstitutional, which would all-but-destroy the remaining protections of the law. “They’re trying to take away the last tool the Supreme Court has not fully dissolved to stop the gross manipulation of elections,” says Nelson.
The conservative effort to erode the VRA dates back decades. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, John Roberts worked strenuously to weaken the law, which he claimed would “lead to a quota system in all areas.”
Roberts lost that fight when Congress voted overwhelmingly to strengthen and reauthorize the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice. In the 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts wrote the majority opinion gutting the heart of the VRA, ruling that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That provision of the law blocked more than 3,000 discriminatory voting changes from 1965 to 2013.
Roberts argued that “things have changed dramatically” since 1965, but his decision has led to a proliferation of new restrictions on voting and racially gerrymandered maps. At least 31 states have passed 115 restrictive voting laws since Shelby County, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, including at least 44 laws in states that previously had to approve their voting changes.
Roberts claimed at the time that the Shelby County ruling “in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in Section 2” of the VRA, which applies nationwide and prohibits voting changes and redistricting maps that discriminate against voters of color. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been steadily working to weaken that remaining part of the VRA, as well.
Roberts tried to limit the power of Section 2 while serving in Reagan’s Justice Department, writing upwards of 25 memos arguing that “violations of Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” Eight years after the Shelby decision, in 2021, Roberts joined the conservative justices in a ruling, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, upholding new voting restrictions from Arizona that made it made it significantly harder to challenge laws that target minority voters under Section 2.
The court’s conservative majority has given the same green light to egregiously gerrymandered redistricting maps.
The decision offered a road map for how legislators could camouflage efforts to target communities of color by claiming they were motivated by partisan politics instead.
In the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts could not review, let alone strike down, claims of partisan gerrymandering. That has emboldened states like Texas to enact blatantly skewed new maps. Indeed, Texas Republicans have repeatedly cited Rucho to justify their new mid-decade redistricting effort.
“I’m not beating around the bush,” Republican State Rep. Todd Hunter, who introduced the new Texas map, said at a legislative hearing last Friday. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.” He admitted the map was being redrawn “for partisan purposes.”
The Rucho decision has also made it easier for states to get away with racial gerrymandering.
In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices upheld the constitutionality of a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court had previously found diluted the power of Black voters and deemed a “stark racial gerrymander.” The Supreme Court disagreed, finding that South Carolina Republicans were motivated by politics, not race, and “acted in good faith.” The decision offered a road map for how legislators could camouflage efforts to target communities of color by claiming they were motivated by partisan politics instead.
Perhaps encouraged by these rulings, conservative appellate courts have gone to even greater lengths to undermine the VRA. Last year, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that minority groups who form a combined majority, such as Black and Hispanic voters in Texas, are not protected under the VRA. The DOJ cited that decision to justify its letter objecting to the state’s current redistricting map.
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an even more extreme decision in 2023, ruling that private plaintiffs could not bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the VRA. The opinion said that only the US Attorney General could bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2, which would decimate enforcement of the law, since more than 80 percent of successful Section 2 cases since 1982 were brought by private plaintiffs.
The Supreme Court recently paused that decision while deciding whether to hear the case, but three justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas—would have affirmed the 8th Circuit, signaling how a fringe legal theory has moved into the mainstream.
A rare exception to the court’s hostility to the VRA occurred in June 2023, when the Supreme Court invalidated Alabama’s congressional map because it did not include a second majority-Black district in a state that is 27 percent Black. That led to the drawing of a new majority-Black district that sent a Democrat to the House.
But the victory was tempered by an ominous warning sign. In a concurring opinion, Brett Kavanaugh stated that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future,” suggesting he was open to killing the last remaining part of the VRA.
That death blow could arrive in the Louisiana case. The state drew a court-ordered second majority-Black district following the Alabama ruling, which a group of self-described “non-African American” voters challenged in court. The facts of the case were very similar to the Alabama one. But the Court, instead of issuing a ruling after holding oral arguments in the spring, instead re-scheduled the case for the next term to examine whether majority-minority districts violate the Constitution.
“I’m very concerned about that,” Holder told me. “The way they have posed the question is extremely troubling. No court has ever ruled that Section Two of the Voting Rights Act violates the Constitution. That’s because the argument is an absurd one that harkens back to the Jim Crow era. Those are the kinds of things that people said back in 1965 and shortly thereafter, when opponents of the Voting Rights Act were trying to say that it was unconstitutional.”
Indeed, so many of the arguments that were made against the VRA at the time of its passage by Southern segregationists have now been embraced by the court’s conservative majority in a more respectable form.
Nelson hopes that the national attention focused on the Texas gerrymander will enlighten the public about the consequences of a gutted VRA. “The Texas example is a stark one and it shows how the manipulation of the most vulnerable voters de-legitimizes our democracy for everyone,” she says. “It’s hard to be hopeful in this moment. But I hope that people, with what’s happening in Texas, may begin to see the essential value of the law as a whole.”