MAGA updates: Racists gutting the VRA

The fine state of Louisiana is asking the USSC to finish the decades-long job of finally getting rid of what's left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law was enacted to protect minority rights from extreme gerrymandering and other anti-voting measures in the south and elsewhere that limited the impact of black voters. Nowadays MAGA elites hate it and attack it as discriminatory against beleaguered white voters. Chief justice John Roberts and MAGA Republican judges on the USSC have been hostile to voting rights and the VRA for decades. 

Louisiana asks the court to gut the main provision of the VRA. The state wants to ban any and all consideration of race in redistricting. That was what the law was intended to do. Louisiana filed its brief after the USSC asked the parties whether compliance with Section 2 of the VRA violates the Constitution’s 14th or 15th Amendments. By framing that question as race-based, the court is probably signaling its intention to finish eviscerating the VRA.

Louisiana's legal challenge argues that the Equal Protection Clause requires government to be completely race-neutral. In their Supreme Court brief filed August 27, 2025, Louisiana argued that "[o]ur Constitution sees neither black voters nor white voters; it sees only American voters" and that "equal justice under law will never be equal as long as States must treat their citizens differently based on skin color".

The state argues that race-based redistricting rests on an invidious stereotype: that all minorities, by virtue of their membership in their racial class, think alike and have the same interests and voting preferences. 

The point of this is clear lawsuit is that white people in LA want to get rid of its black Representatives in the House. Federal courts have told LA to redraw is voting districts so that there is a black House member. The state refused to do so, then reluctantly complied. By framing this case as a matter of violation of equal protection , the USSC is signaling that it intends to get rid of what is left of the VRA. 

This is another example of MAGA elites wanting laws that allow white people to discriminate against groups the elites hate and want freedom to discriminate against and oppress, e.g., the LGBQT community, racial minorities and women. This looks, walks and quacks like racism. But is this racist, or at least bigoted? The state would vehemently argue it is not racist, but merely high-minded and color blind.  

That's not very convincing in view of LA's racial history. The state has a documented century-long pattern of systematically disenfranchising black voters through increasingly sophisticated legal mechanisms. The current lawsuit is just a part of an established historical pattern of discrimination, not than an isolated constitutional dispute. 

The state's 1898 Constitution was explicitly designed to "purify the electorate" by eliminating Black voters. The framers "explicitly expressed their goal" to create a white-only electorate through poll taxes and property requirements, literacy tests with complete registrar discretion, and a "Grandfather Clause" that exempted whites whose ancestors voted before 1867 (when blacks were slaves). From 1921-1965, Louisiana's "interpretation test" exemplified systematic racial discrimination. Registrars had complete discretion to decide whether a registrant's interpretation was satisfactory. They used their discretion to reject 64% of black registrants, but just 2% of whites. In 21 parishes, only 8.6% of voting-age African Americans were registered in 1962.

That is what the VRA was passed to deal with.

After the VRA was passed, LA began a new phase of its campaign to minimize the black vote. Legislators passing state laws that enabled parish councils and school boards to switch to at-large elections. That tactic smothered newly-registered black voters in white majorities.