How Justice Alito set a 'disturbing precedent' for core American right

In a 6-3 ruling handed down on Monday, March 2, the U.S. Supreme Court's GOP-appointed supermajority ruled to uphold a congressional map favoring Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-New York) — who serves in the U.S. House of Representatives via parts of Staten Island and Brooklyn. The ruling in Malliotakis v. Williams overturned a previous decision by a judge who decided that the map discriminated against Black and Latino voters in New York City.

The ruling came down along partisan lines, with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joining fellow Democratic appointee, Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion. All six of the High Court's GOP appointees sided with Malliotakis.

Mother Jones' Ari Berman offers a biting critique of the ruling in an article published on March 3, arguing that Justice Samuel Alito's opinion is an ominous sign for voting rights.

Sotomayor, Berman notes, "blasted the Court's conservative majority for using one set of rules to uphold redistricting maps that benefit white voters and Republicans in states like Texas while using a completely different set of rules to strike down maps that benefit racial minorities and Democrats in places like New York."

"The majority did not explain its reasoning," according to Berman, "but most concerning was the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, in which he wrote that districts drawn 'for the express purpose of ensuring that minority voter are able to elect the candidate of their choice' represented 'unadorned racial discrimination, an inherently odious activity that violates the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause except in the most extraordinary case.' Alito is essentially saying that districts drawn under the Voting Rights Act or other federal and state laws to remedy centuries of racial discrimination are as racist as the racism, including the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, they were meant to rectify."

Berman continues, "Court watchers speculate that Alito, because he has not authored an opinion from the Court's term last October, is writing the majority opinion in a hugely important case the Court has yet to rule on concerning the constitutionality of the last remaining section of the Voting Rights Act. If that's the case, the VRA — and by extension, the fate of American democracy — will be in very, very bad shape."

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, forbids racial discrimination in voting and was a landmark part of the Great Society — LBJ's expansion of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

Alito, Berman warns, "seems certain to kill the VRA outright or narrow it to the point of irrelevancy."

"If the Court were to rule against the VRA this spring," the Mother Jones journalist writes, "that could shift roughly a dozen seats in the GOP's favor this year, turbocharging Trump's efforts to manipulate the midterms. Alito is now telegraphing just how far he's prepared to go."

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