When Chief Justice John Roberts began reading his decision in a voting rights dispute from the Supreme Court bench on Thursday, few would have expected the significant turn he was about to take favoring Black voters in Alabama.
Here was the author of a 2013 decision that had eviscerated a crucial safeguard of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a jurist who had repeatedly criticized specific efforts to protect Black and Latino voters in redistricting, or as he once called it, “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
The court’s newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first African American woman on the bench, looked down pensively. Only Justice Elena Kagan had her head turned directly toward the chief, sitting at the center of the elevated mahogany expanse, as he began explaining that the key VRA section in dispute was written “to ensure that all voters can participate” in elections.
Roberts then revealed to all what his colleagues knew: He was swerving off a path he had taken for decades, since the early 1980s when he served in the Reagan administration and sought to narrow the reach of the landmark voting-rights law.
Joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson), Roberts affirmed a lower court decision that Alabama had breached the VRA when it devised a congressional districting plan that included only one Black-majority district among seven districts in a state that has a 27% Black population.
Alabama must now adopt a new state congressional map that includes a second Black-majority district.
More importantly, as he defied expectations of civil rights advocates, Roberts maintained a decades-old framework for testing when a state legislature has drawn a racially biased map, diluting the votes of Black citizens, for example, by dividing or…
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