During oral arguments for a major case that could put an end to race-based gerrymandering on Wednesday, Democrat-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that race should be a consideration when drawing congressional districts because black people are systemically “disabled” and don’t have proper access to voting systems.
Jackson drew a comparison between the redistricting cases in question, Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, and accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She implied that minorities like black people are systemically blocked from accessing voting polls (a demonstrably false claim) and compared this to disabled people not being able to access a building. She used this faulty comparison to bolster her underlying argument that past race-based discrimination should allow for a present race-based remedy.
“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities, and so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings,” Jackson said. She argued that whether such discrimination is intentional is irrelevant.
“I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. … We are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system, right? They’re disabled. … We say that’s a way in which you see that these processes are not equally open.”
The case considers possible 14th Amendment violations of a congressional district map in Louisiana. As The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood has reported, the origins of the case date back to 2022, “when the Louisiana Legislature drafted a congressional map with a single black-majority district.” This led to a lawsuit by a group of plaintiffs — “represented by left-wing groups like the ACLU” — who alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by “dilut[ing] black voting strength.”
“Following an injunction barring the map’s implementation by a district court judge, continued litigation in the case ultimately resulted in the state redrawing the map to include a second black-majority district. This led to another lawsuit from a different group of plaintiffs, who claimed the state unlawfully prioritized race in the map’s creation and therefore violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause,” Fleetwood reported. “A three-judge panel on a separate district court agreed with these plaintiffs and blocked the new map’s implementation.”
The Supreme Court was initially slated to decide the case during its 2024-2025 term, but announced in June that it would rehear the case this fall.
During oral arguments on Wednesday, counsel for Louisiana argued that “race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” and draws on “racial stereotypes” assuming that “a black voter, simply because he is black, must think like other black voters, share the same interests, and prefer the same political candidates.”
Janai Nelson, arguing in favor of the second majority-black district, alleged that several lower court judges had acknowledged discriminatory practices in Louisiana’s maps, and claimed that “Louisiana’s creation of a district to remedy that discrimination and to ensure that black Louisianans have an equal opportunity to participate in the process is constitutional.”
Notably, Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., mourned the death of Assata Shakur — who was convicted of killing a state trooper and was added to the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list — as a “freedom fighter” and “example of undaunted resistance and resilience.”
Catherine Gripp is a graduate of Arizona Christian University where she earned a degree in communication and a minor in political science. She writes for The Federalist as a reporting intern.