By Craig J. DeLuz
The Supreme Court has done something remarkable.
It has ruled that the Constitution means what it says. The Equal Protection Clause forbids racial discrimination. Apparently, this is controversial.
The court’s decision striking down Louisiana’s court-mandated congressional map has sent Democrats into theatrical fits of outrage. Chuck Schumer calls it a return to Jim Crow. Barack Obama says the court is abandoning its role in protecting minority rights. Kamala Harris warns of a grand conspiracy to suppress the Black vote.
But before accepting this narrative, it is worth asking a straightforward question: if Democrats are so deeply concerned about Black Americans, why does their concern so reliably align with their own electoral interests?
To understand what is actually at stake, one must be honest about history. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not born from paranoia or partisan calculation. It was born from documented, systematic, legally enforced brutality against Black political participation across the Deep South. States deployed literacy tests designed to be failed. Poll taxes priced Black citizens out of the ballot box. Registrars turned away qualified Black applicants on technicalities invented on the spot. In some counties where Black residents constituted a majority, virtually none appeared on the voter rolls. Those who pressed the matter risked their livelihoods, their safety, and sometimes their lives.
Selma was not a metaphor. It was a bridge, and the people beaten on it were trying to do nothing more than register to vote.
The Voting Rights Act was a necessary and just response to a genuine and documented emergency. It deserves to be honored. Which is precisely why it deserves to be applied honestly, rather than stretched beyond recognition to serve ends its authors never intended.
Consider what the Louisiana court-ordered map actually looked like. To manufacture a second majority-Black congressional district, a court forced the state to draw a district stretching roughly 150 miles (from New Orleans to Shreveport) carving through the heart of the state to stitch together Black populations in communities more than a hundred miles apart. Geographic compactness, one of the fundamental standards for legitimate districting, was thrown out entirely. The goal was not coherent representation. The goal was racial arithmetic.
