U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is now on the bench, and she is already — as could be expected — making a stand for the rights of marginalized communities against right-wing attempts at voter suppression.
This week, the court heard oral arguments in a case in which a Talking Points Memo reporter summarized Alabama authorities are pushing for a so-called race-neutral approach to redistricting. The problem is that adopting such a method could provide an evasion tactic in the push to secure the rights historically denied to Black communities and other marginalized groups. If race isn’t considered at all in drawing legislative district lines, then within the redistricting process what chances for fixing what was historically imposed on these voters will remain? Purposeful attention to the subject could prove critical. Accordingly, fellow Dem-nominated Justice Elena Kagan pointed to the issue during this week’s oral arguments that approaching redistricting in an ostensibly race-neutral manner could lead to zero districts with a majority of otherwise minority groups.
Jackson, meanwhile, pointed out how historically grounded interpretations of relevant pieces of federal law reveal that approaching race-related issues with intention isn’t a new concept. “I don’t think we can assume that, just because race is taken into account, that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem,” she remarked, as Talking Points Memo recapped. “Because I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution and what the framers and founders thought about, and when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment in a race-conscious way.”
She referenced another historical document in furthering her point. “I looked at the report that was submitted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction which drafted the 14th Amendment, and that report says that the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves,” she added. GOP judges often point to historical arguments — well-founded or not — in making their own present-day claims. Such finger-pointing into history drove some of the conservative reasoning in Dobbs, the case in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court — which recently refused to hear an appeal from Mike Lindell trying to get out of defamation litigation tied to his election lies and where Trump is now trying to get help in stopping the investigative usage by the Justice Department of items marked classified that FBI agents seized from Mar-a-Lago — was also scheduled to hear a case in which North Carolina legislators are arguing for nearly total independence, at least from the state judiciary, in establishing the rules for federal elections.
