← Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Opinionpalooza: Justice Alito Flies the Flag for Racial Gerrymanders (Preview)
00:07:22
The Supreme Court’s June rampage begins in May with a very bad racial gerrymander decision
Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:04]
A
Hi, I'm Dahlia Lithwick, host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the rule of law and the Supreme Court. And it is opinion palooza season here on Amicus. There are about three dozen decisions coming our way over the next few weeks. We're going to find out whether adjudicated domestic abusers have the right to bear arms, whether the fifth Circuit is going to replace the FDA to do abortion drug approval, and if coup prone presidents are truly above the law. We're also going to find out whether pre viability fetuses have more rights than their reproductive hosts, we call them women. And whether federal agencies can even exist. All that and more. And as we attempt to drink from this fire hose of Supreme Court opinions, we're going to be releasing extra emergency episodes for PLUS subscribers with analysis of the biggest cases just as fast as Mark Stern and I can race to our closets and fire up our laptops. So our first emergency opinion Palooza episode concerns not the New York Times reporting from Wednesday night that the Alitos had a second insurrection adjacent religious extremist flag flying over their vacation home this past summer and that the Democrats are responding to that news with strongly worded letters. Again, nope. The real Emergency is the 6 to 3 decision handed down Thursday morning in Alexander versus South Carolina NAACP, finding that a lower court ruling that held that South Carolina's congressional map was a racial gerrymander was wrong. Writing for the 6 to 3 conservative supermajority, Justice Samuel Alito finds that this major redistricting win in South Carolina was wrongly decided because race was not, in fact, the predominant reason for the new maps. The case is now reversed and remanded. It is a very dark day for voting rights. My jurisprudential ride or die Mark Joseph Stern joined me to talk about the significance of this decision.
- [02:12]
B
It's terrible. It's a really, really bad decision. Dalia. I know that people are used to, you know, hearing bad news about the Supreme Court, especially when it comes to voting rights. There might be a temptation to shrug and say, well, what did you expect? But this is terrible. I mean, this is the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority, effectively slamming the door shut on claims of racial gerrymandering as far as I can see, forever, and doing so in, in a maximally gaslighty way through the majority opinion by Justice Alito, which is so mansplainy it will make your eyeballs freeze over and pop right out. So we can dig into it, but I just want people to keep in mind that, that, you know, what we are describing here. This is not just another sort of normal, like, oh, it's a blow to voting rights. It's the next step in the Supreme Court's march toward autocracy. Whatever. This feels like the end of an era. This feels like the end of federal courts being able to adjudicate racial gerrymandering claims. I just think it's over now.
- [03:15]
A
Yeah. And we're going to talk in one second about the sort of long progression of doctrine that got us away from this and back into this. But I just want to. I guess I first want to apologize for my joke. You can hate the flag and the Alexander decision. I'm okay with hating both. I think you can hate the player and the game. But I do think, Mark, that this is one of those eye crossingly complicated doctrinal areas that do tend to make people glaze over. It's not just voting rights, it's gerrymandering. It's not just racial, it's also political. Could you do us the kindness of both setting the table and explaining what you just started to explain, which is as a function of years of Alito and Roberts and other justices hacking away at what had been a kind of a pretty solid edifice protecting minority voting rights. This almost feels like the logical last chain to dismantling that.
- [04:16]
B
Yeah. So this is a case out of South Carolina involving two congressional districts, District 1 and District 6. District 1 was drawn by Republican lawmakers in the state legislature to be a Republican district. But throughout the 2010s, it started to lean left. And in 2018, a Democrat narrowly won this district around Charleston. Um, a Republican won it back in 2020. But after the census in 2020, the Republican legislature came in and said, you know, we really don't like that this district. District one is suddenly competitive for Democrats. And we notice that there are a lot of black residents there and they tend to vote for Democrats. So what we're going to do is shift out a bunch of these black residents who are voting for Democrats into this other district that's already deeply Democratic and heavily black. That's Jim Clyburn's district elsewhere in the state. We're just going to take these black voters in District 1 and shovel them right out. They're going to go elsewhere and we're going to move some white vot to District one. And by doing this switcheroo, we will shore up the district's Republican lean, make it less black, more lily white, and therefore more gop. Friendly. That's what they did. It worked. It is now a more Republican district. But voting rights advocates who are victims of this targeting filed a lawsuit alleging that the state legislature had violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause by using race as a predominant factor in the redistricting of this area. A three judge district court heard lengthy arguments over this case, saw lots of exhibits, heard lots of witnesses, really dug deep in and found that yes, indeed, race did predominate. The state legislature might pretend that it was only caring about partisan politics, but what it really did was pluck these individuals out because of their race and treat them differently by sorting them on the basis of their skin color. Then that was uncomfortable Constitutional so the three judge district court said the map was unconstitutional and On Thursday the U.S. supreme Court reversed that decision, rubber stamped the map and said Racial gerrymandering Now Racial gerrymandering tomorrow Racial gerrymandering forever.
- [06:47]
A
During Opinion Palooza. Slate plus members don't have to wait for our opinions on the opinions, with access to emergency episodes whenever the biggest decisions come down. If you are not a subscriber, go to slate.com amicusplus to join, or if you're listening in Apple Podcasts, click Try Free at the top of our show page. We'll be back on Saturday with this week's episode of Amicus, and we will talk to you then.