A wave of new voting restrictions across the South were triggered in part by the Supreme Court, reshaping election law to give the Republican Party a significant edge as it seeks to retake control of Congress next year and the White House in 2024.
Biden asks Vice President Kamala Harris to lead his administration’s efforts to protect voting rights as many states work to add restrictions.The court’s redistricting decisions alone could be enough to shift control in the U.S. House next year, according to Michael Li, a scholar at the Brennan Center. This will be the first cycle of redistricting in more than 50 years in which the Southern states may put their election maps into effect immediately.
During the civil rights era of the 1960s and for some time beyond, the Supreme Court spoke of voting as a fundamental right, one judges had a duty to protect. Harvard Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who teaches election law, said he wouldn’t speculate about the intent of the justices. “But across the right to vote, redistricting, the Voting Rights Act and campaign finance, the court’s decisions have benefited Republicans,” he said. “And partisan advantage explains these decisions better than rival hypotheses like originalism, precedent, or judicial nonintervention.
Republicans did not invent gerrymandering. Democrats led the way in the past. But when Republicans won big in the 2010 midterm election, they drew election districts to lock in their party’s control. When challenged in court, the Supreme Court sided with the states over their voters.to uphold North Carolina’s Republican legislators whose gerrymandered map all but assured Republicans would hold 10 of 13 seats in Congress, even if Democrats won more votes statewide.
They cited Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that ended a recount of paper card ballots in Florida, preserving George W. Bush’s narrow victory in 2000. “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election,” the court said, adding that even then, the state could still take back the power to appoint the electors who ultimately choose the president.
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