The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

The next victim of the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision will be workers

The Trump administration wants to extend Justice Sam Alito’s approach to race to everything.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice released an opinion on Tuesday that, in the likely event it is embraced by a Republican-controlled federal judiciary, would make it significantly harder for plaintiffs who face employment discrimination to prevail in court.

The opinion was released by the Office of Legal Counsel, an institution that interprets federal law and the Constitution for executive branch officials, and is signed by T. Elliot Gaiser, the head of that office. Gaiser is a former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which repealed a 1982 amendment to the federal Voting Rights Act and greenlit a new round of gerrymandering by white Southern Republican lawmakers.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

Gaiser’s opinion argues that Alito’s attack on the Voting Rights Act in Callais applies with equal force to anti-discrimination law in employment. And, if you accept Alito’s opinion in Callais as legitimate, then Gaiser’s approach to employment discrimination is hardly a stretch. Indeed, it is the next logical move in the Republican Party’s broader campaign to weaken civil rights protections for racial minorities.

Notably, one day after Gaiser released his opinion, Trump’s Department of Transportation announced that it was applying Callais to its regulations. So it appears that this administration wants to implement Alito’s views throughout the executive branch.

The 1982 law that Alito targeted in Callais provided that voting rights plaintiffs who challenged a state election law did not need to prove that state lawmakers acted with racist intent in order to prevail. Under that law, which was repealed by Callais, a state law that “results” in voters having their right to vote diminished due to their race may also be challenged.

For 40 years, the Supreme Court interpreted this “results” test to sometimes require states to draw a minimum number of legislative districts where Black or Latino voters can elect their candidates of choice. After........

© Vox