LA gives roadmap to negate current VRA assumption

Louisiana has given a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court what it wants, argumentation to cancel one of the greatest con jobs in legal history.

Today, the state turned in its brief in Louisiana v. Callais as requested by the Court. Heard last spring, the Court took the unusual step of delaying any decision on the case that has invalidated the state’s congressional map, pending the addressing (scheduled for Oct. 15) of the question whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act conflicts with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The state had complained there was conflict, claiming it had to follow the Allen v. Milligan precedent that said states had to follow jurisprudence from Thornburg v. Gingles on down, which fleshed out Section 2. That line led to the assumption that if a minority group in a jurisdiction met certain criteria (the “Gingles Preconditions”), no matter whether there was any discriminatory intent it was assumed that any reapportionment plan, regardless of how well it adhered to traditional principles of reapportionment (such as keeping communities of interest together, contiguity, reasonable compactness, etc.), if there wasn’t some kind of rough equivalence of the proportionality of majority-minority districts among all to the proportionality of the minority race in the constituency then this constituted “vote dilution” that by definition was discriminatory, justifying the use of race as the preferred criterion in drawing a map.

But in that Allen decision, Assoc. Justice Brett Kavanaugh sowed the seeds for a reevaluation of that base assumption, writing he thought the question needed asking but wasn’t in Allen, supposing whether the supposition was timebound. That was the question the Court posed instead of making a ruling, and Louisiana answered using ammunition unavailable at the time of that case.

Three weeks after Allen came out in 2023, the Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that negated almost every use of race for preferential admissions for schooling that addressed a similar conflict with the 14^th Amendment. That case successfully argued that societal conditions had changed so that the supposition that minorities automatically were eligible for preferential treatment merely because past vestiges of discrimination, instead of showing documented intentional discrimination, had dissipated in need. In its brief, Louisiana uses the same logic applied to the supposition that any vote dilution necessarily has discriminatory impact solely on the basis of race.

In the process, it highlights the increasing chicanery proponents of that supposition use to try to convince courts that “discrimination” on the basis of race is alive and well. Those proponents increasing resort to bizarre and absurd arguments to bolster this, such as claiming “racism” is present because, for example, a sheriff’s office is housed on the same floor as a voter registrar’s office or that even the absence of any evidence, whether valid, of discrimination shows that it’s only hidden too well.

Understand the intellectually-porous assumption here. As overt racism began to subside by the 1980s in measurements of people’s attitudes and in their actions, academia came up with a new redefinition to make the claim race prejudice lives on: “symbolic racism,” or the idea that opposition to policies designed to give preferential treatment to minorities, or even to race-neutral policies whose beneficiaries were disproportionately minorities, itself was a hidden form of racism. The idea evolved into wokeism where someone is considered a racist for merely supporting the idea that government and societal institutions are not irredeemably racist, making one a racist, for example, if believing meritocracy should determine employment or admissions decisions because the idea of merit itself is racist as the forces determining what is that are rigged against minorities.

This ethos shapes entirely the argumentation made in favor of the proportionality argument in reapportionment (despite the fact that the VRA explicitly disavows its use). In essence, it argues that there is no conflict between the amendment and statute because “the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” but which must assume that present discrimination institutionally and can do so only with tortuous, nonsensical arguments that attempt to redefine what genuine prejudicial discrimination is.

Of course, the dirty secret behind all of this that proponents advance is the primarily goal of it all is achieving political power. They invent “present discrimination” as a given behind any arrangement that does not give preferential treatment by race in favor of the minority because they know in mapping a maximization of M/M districts this bolsters the power of the political left because almost all black political elites, who would win in these districts, are leftists who wave the bloody shirt decrying constantly alleged racism as a major reason to elect them.

By contrast, the Louisiana argument invites consideration that a reluctance to maximize the number of M/M districts isn’t to discriminate against blacks but, as one potential motivation, to minimize the number of districts controlled by leftists who happen to be a minority. This resulting understanding that causation differs from association explains why very likely not only will the Court end up upholding that the state’s proportional system is unconstitutional because it’s a racial gerrymander, but that it also will rule the guidelines it put down in Gingles have outlived their usefulness and conditions have changed to the point that the conflict with the Equal Protection Clause no longer can be ignored.