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The U.S. Supreme Court has effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining major provision of the landmark 1965 law that was a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.

In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, a majority of justices ruled Wednesday that Louisiana must redraw a congressional map that was designed to create a second majority-Black district in the state, where African Americans have long faced racial segregation and barriers to voting. They said the electoral map “relied too heavily on race,” an interpretation that is set to usher in another wave of redistricting across the South to help Republicans win more seats in Congress.

“This is central to whether or not we maintain a multiracial democracy in this country,” says lawyer and civil rights activist Maya Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She calls Wednesday’s ruling “a free pass to discriminate.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show looking at the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. On Wednesday, in a 6-to-3 decision, the court struck down Louisiana’s voting map that was designed to create a second majority-Black district in the state, where African Americans have long faced racial segregation and barriers to voting. The six conservative justices on the court ruled Louisiana’s map, quote, “relied too heavily on race” and unfairly favored Black voters over white voters.

AOC Calls on Dems to “Play by Same Rules” Republicans Do on Gerrymandering

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the ruling as the, quote, “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” Kagan warned that the ruling will give states the power to draw congressional maps to disenfranchise voters of color. She wrote, quote, “Minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

AMY GOODMAN: Republican politicians rapidly seized on Wednesday’s ruling. The Washington Post reports Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry told Republican House candidates he plans to suspend the May 16th primary election so state lawmakers can pass a new congressional map first. Meanwhile, in a special session on Wednesday, Florida lawmakers approved a new congressional map designed to give Republicans four additional U.S. House seats in the midterm elections in November.

On Wednesday, members of the Congressional Black Caucus gathered to condemn the Supreme Court ruling. This is Alabama Congressmember Terri Sewell.

REP. TERRI SEWELL: Today, the far-right Supreme Court has dealt a devastating blow to our democracy and to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It will pave the way for the greatest reduction in representation for Black and minority voters since the years following Reconstruction. What the court did today makes it easier for bad state actors to silence the voices of Black voters and harder to challenge the discrimination in court. … With this decision, the extremists on the Supreme Court have completed their decadeslong crusade to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They willingly dismissed generations of legal precedent, of congressional intent and the will of the American people. In doing so, they had given a green light to Donald Trump’s partisan voter suppression scheme. Instead of responding to the will of the people and changing course, Trump and Republicans are trying to erode our democracy and suppress the vote to escape accountability at the ballot box. They’re looking to steal the election. And we in the Congressional Black Caucus say, “No.” CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: No. REP. TERRI SEWELL: We say, “Hell no!” CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: Hell no! REP. TERRI SEWELL: Not without a fight. I am a daughter of Selma, Alabama, and I grew up in the shadow of the civil rights movement. The foot soldiers who marched across that bridge were my neighbors, my church members, my parishioners and my babysitters. I am here to tell you that the progress secured by those foot soldiers is being erased before our very eyes. And we say, “No!” CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: No! REP. TERRI SEWELL: We say, “Hell no.” CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: Hell no. REP. TERRI SEWELL: Not on our watch.

REP. TERRI SEWELL: Today, the far-right Supreme Court has dealt a devastating blow to our democracy and to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It will pave the way for the greatest reduction in representation for Black and minority voters since the years following Reconstruction. What the court did today makes it easier for bad state actors to silence the voices of Black voters and harder to challenge the discrimination in court. …

With this decision, the extremists on the Supreme Court have completed their decadeslong crusade to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They willingly dismissed generations of legal precedent, of congressional intent and the will of the American people. In doing so, they had given a green light to Donald Trump’s partisan voter suppression scheme. Instead of responding to the will of the people and changing course, Trump and Republicans are trying to erode our democracy and suppress the vote to escape accountability at the ballot box. They’re looking to steal the election. And we in the Congressional Black Caucus say, “No.”

CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: No.

REP. TERRI SEWELL: We say, “Hell no!”

CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: Hell no!

REP. TERRI SEWELL: Not without a fight. I am a daughter of Selma, Alabama, and I grew up in the shadow of the civil rights movement. The foot soldiers who marched across that bridge were my neighbors, my church members, my parishioners and my babysitters. I am here to tell you that the progress secured by those foot soldiers is being erased before our very eyes. And we say, “No!”

CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: No!

REP. TERRI SEWELL: We say, “Hell no.”

CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS MEMBERS: Hell no.

REP. TERRI SEWELL: Not on our watch.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Democratic Congressmember Terri Sewell of Alabama.

We’re joined now by Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, longtime civil rights attorney.

Maya, thanks so much for being with us. If you can address our global audience and talk about the significance of the Voting Rights Act and what happened with yesterday’s ruling?

MAYA WILEY: Well, first of all, Amy, thank you for having me, and thank you for this conversation.

This is central to whether or not we maintain a multiracial democracy in this country and a real way for Black people, for Latinos, for Native Americans and Asian Americans to have a real opportunity to say who leads us. It is that simple.

But if you put it in context — let’s put it in context. You know, not only you heard from Representative Terri Sewell, who is an amazing leader on voting rights and from the place where Black people marched, along with white allies, and faced not just attack, even threats of death, hospitalization, simply for peacefully marching for the right to vote — I say that because what they won by putting their bodies on the line was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the nation’s largest and most diverse civil rights coalition, helped win. But what winning the Voting Rights Act did was take us from a place where there was virtually no representation in Congress or in state houses, because even in states, like Alabama, like Louisiana, like so many other states, where we had large percentages of Black people, also later Latinos, as that population has grown, and Asian Americans, or in states with Native American populations that are large, did not have people who had to be accountable, because you could simply gerrymander, draw a map that was not fair in terms of interests of community, of the types of things communities would demand, that enable people to get together and say who’s going to be our candidate, who’s going to solve our problems, who’s going to show up and speak to our needs.

And we changed that because, essentially, Congress did something extremely important. It said, “You know what? Yes, intentional discrimination, we know, is unconstitutional. But what we have is a country that has segregated people by race. What we have as a country is such a long history of hiding the ability to steal power from Black people or from Latinos in all kinds of ways, that don’t even have to name it. We’re going to look at the impact. If the impact on a voting decision, on a way of organizing the process of voting means that the effect is that a large number of Black people or Latinos or anybody based on race will not have a fair opportunity to decide who leads us, that violates the Voting Rights Act.” And the reason that was so critical is, you know, even if it was bean counting or naming the number of judges that existed in state courts, or all the ridiculous things that were thrown as intentional hurdles to Black people voting in the South, for example, didn’t say race, didn’t name it.

And so, what Justice Alito and this really radicalized right-wing majority did was say, “Because we think that we shouldn’t be able to say anything about partisan politics, we’re not just going to create a loophole. We’re going to create the sunken place where, essentially, any politicians who are controlling the politics of a state can just say, ’We’re not discriminating. We just want to win. And we will win if Black people can’t have a district where they have the ability to say who leads them,’” because rather than competing for our votes, rather than trying to find the kinds of coalitions of the willing to create and solve — create solutions to problems we all share, they’d rather just figure out a way to stay in power. That means state house races. That means school board races. But it also means who leads us in this country and whether or not we have a Congressional Black Caucus, who makes arguments for civil rights, but also for things like access to healthcare, or a Latino caucus, where we have enough political power to say, “You can’t ignore how we are being treated.” And the Supreme Court said, “We will turn not only a blind eye; we will have our eyes wide open and say, ‘You can’t prove it.’”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Maya, the principal provision in the Voting Rights Act is Section 2, which this ruling has effectively eviscerated. If you could explain what Section 2 calls for?

MAYA WILEY: Yeah, and that’s what I was just summarizing, was basically what Section 2 says. So, first of all, let me just say this, because especially not just for a global audience, but for a national audience, the context in which Representative Sewell said this is a decadeslong fight to take away our rights and our ability to have leaders who look like us and who represent us, and that is that this Supreme Court said — first of all, took away Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This is a section that said, you know, there has been so many shenanigans in blocking people of color — Black, Latino, Native American, Asian — from being able to vote, that we need a provision that says you have to get preclearance. If you have a long history of racial discrimination in this area, you have to have the Department of Justice say it’s OK how you draw your electoral map or how you design other systems around voting, like early voting systems or where you have polling sites. And when this Supreme Court in 2013 said, “You know what? We’re going to say you haven’t — history has changed. We’re doing such a great job in the United States. You don’t have to do that anymore,” that opened the flood gates, opened the flood gates for now what created a huge gap in voter turnout, because we just had barrier after barrier after barrier thrown in our way, including on how maps were drawn. That means we have states that aren’t representing the real population of those states.

But Section 2 remained. Section 2 said, “OK, but you can still sue.” You can still bring a lawsuit if a state does anything that has the effect of making it harder for you to have a real opportunity as a Black community, as a Latino community, as a Native American community, to say who leads us, to participate in the process of voting. If it impacts you and it is clear that it impacts you, then we’re going to say it’s not OK. We’re going to say it’s discriminatory.

What this Supreme Court said is, “Really hard to prove intent. In fact, it’s so hard to prove intent, that we’re going to say, even though Congress said you don’t have to show that someone hates you, you don’t have to show that any politicians are saying, ‘We just don’t want Black people voting,’ we’re going to say it’s fine to prevent large numbers of Black people from being represented, or make it harder for large numbers of Latino people to get access to a poll, or Native Americans. We’re going to say that’s OK, unless you can show us a rabid racist,” even though Congress said, “No, it’s just about the effect. It’s just about the outcome.”

So, when they did this yesterday, what they were saying, and what Justice Kagan in her dissent said, is, “Y’all just giving them a free pass to discriminate.” And all they have to do to do it is say, “It’s just good for Republicans.” And I’m saying that because that’s who’s running around right now saying, “Let’s change all our maps.” Democrats are now going to do it, too, and started doing it. But it’s just creating a new kind of civil war about who wants to have our votes. And if you’re already in control in a state house, all you have to do to discriminate is say, “Yeah, it’s just good for our party.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, The New York Times reported, and this is in terms of the midterms coming up later this year, that hours after the ruling, Florida’s Legislature approved a new map that could give Republicans as many as four new seats in the state’s congressional delegation, and other states are expected to follow. If you could talk about the implications of that?

MAYA WILEY: Yeah, I mean, this is — this is why this opinion is a devastating blow, because it has literally — states have been organizing around this for a while. And as we know, Donald Trump asked for states, like Texas, other states, to rig their maps to guarantee an outcome for Republicans so they could hold on to the U.S. Congress, to the House. And it was blatant, right? But what that means is you go for people of color. You go to draw maps that we call either packing or cracking communities of color. We’ve got racial segregation. We’ve got communities that are majority people of some kind of color — they’re not without some diversity, but where there really is a large segment of people who live near each other, have shared interests.

And so, Republicans started preparing those maps — in some instances, were already passing them. That’s why we had this lawsuit in the first place. And then, as we have seen, they were just waiting for permission to say, “It’s politics. It’s partisan.” And so, Florida has had a long stretch of this.

By the way, let’s remember, for many in your audience may not remember this, after Barack Obama won election in 2008 and as we were approaching the 2012 elections, you know, we saw, all of a sudden, claims that there was voter fraud, that undocumented immigrants were voting, that we had to make it much more difficult to prove you had the ability to vote lawfully. And what that did was disenfranchise a lot of people of color.

But we had — we had Republican — Republican Party head in Florida, Republican Party head in Pennsylvania saying that quiet part out loud, is, “We can deliver an election this way.” And so, it’s not surprising to now see Florida or Louisiana or Alabama or Missouri, any of these states, saying, “Game on. Now we’re going to use this to make sure that large segments of our population who are people of color don’t count.”

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Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Nermeen Shaikh is a broadcast news producer and weekly co-host at Democracy Now! in New York City. She worked in research and nongovernmental organizations before joining Democracy Now! She has a masters of philosophy from Cambridge University and is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power (Columbia University Press).

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