Clyburn warns of ‘never-ending’ redistricting fights after Supreme Court strikes LA map

(WCIV) — Representative James Clyburn, South Carolina’s sole Democrat in Congress, issued a stark warning in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike a Louisiana district map and render Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.”

FILE – Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., speaks, Nov. 18, 2023, in Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard, File)

Wednesday morning, SCOTUS ruled that Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander by infringing on the rights of white voters under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause in a 6-3 vote. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion that ultimately reverses lower court decisions stemming from the 2020 drawing of Louisiana’s map, which was initially declared to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act because only one of the six districts contained a majority of Black voters while more than one third of the state’s voting age population was Black. The 2024 map was drawn as a result of that lower court ruling to create a second majority-Black district, which ultimately made its way to SCOTUS and was ruled unconstitutional Wednesday.

James Sample, an ABC News legal contributor and constitutional law professor at Hofstra University, said that while the Court insists it is safeguarding equality with the ruling, critics argue SCOTUS has disarmed one of the United States’ most effective tools for achieving it. Rep. Clyburn agrees.

“This decision threatens to send our country deeper into the thicket of never-ending redistricting fights, with repeated aggressive map redraws, protracted legal battles, and relentless partisan tugs-of-war, all of which are destined to result in more regressive Court decisions,” the congressman said after the decision was handed down, calling it a “giant step backward” in the “pursuit of a more perfect Union” made as the “activist” Supreme Court dismantles the Voting Rights Act “one decision at a time.”

“This Court seems hellbent on redeeming the post-Reconstruction America that neutered the 1875 Civil Rights Act and other legislative and judicial actions that drastically limited Black participation and achievement, and eliminated African American political representation in multiple Southern states,” Rep. Clyburn added.

Sample noted that the case before SCOTUS hinged on a “profound constitutional disagreement” surrounding the 14th and 15th Amendments, which were adopted during Reconstruction after the Civil War to secure equal citizenship for formerly enslaved people and protect them from racial discrimination, particularly in voting, prior to the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act. He said that by prioritizing formal “colorblindness” for congressional maps over substantive equality “the Court has recast the Reconstruction Amendments from tools of inclusion into constraints on remediation.”

Justice Elena Kagan said in a dissenting opinion that the ruling “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

“A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—’cracked’ is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence,” she explained. “Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests.”