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In a scathing dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the court’s conservative majority has completed its “demolition” of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decade-long effort to gut the Voting Rights Act reached its “now-completed demolition” with a ruling on Wednesday from its conservative majority in a case related to Louisiana’s voting maps, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a scathing dissent.
The 6-3 ruling in the case Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Samuel Alito on behalf of the court’s conservative bloc, tossed out a Louisiana voting map creating a second majority-Black congressional district in a state with six total U.S. House districts. About one-third of voters in Louisiana are Black.
“The Voting Rights Act is — or, now more accurately, was — ‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history,’” Kagan wrote.
Kagan’s dissent ran longer than the ruling itself and she read from the bench to underscore her disagreement.