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Notes -
What’s wrong with the 15th Amendment? It specifically mentions race.
I suppose you could argue that it only says “vote” and that “votes” don’t have to mean “representation.” I’d say that’s splitting hairs. The postwar amendments were designed to secure the rights of freed slaves. Then they got a hundred years of stress tests by motivated Southerners. You’re not going to discover some fresh loophole.
And they were written in the same idealistically neutral manner as all the other founding documents; it was the later activist Supreme Courts that made the preferences explicit.
Ames v. Ohio was pleasantly unanimous, but Harvard v. SFFA was not and even the majority had Roberts keeping in a how-to section to keep discriminating; I suspect whatever comes out of Callais will closer resemble the latter.
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Here is the text of the 15th Amendment:
Nothing in the text gives specific races any special representation. It gives citizens of all races the right to vote. A black person in any given electoral district has exactly the same voting power as a white person in the same district.
The issue is that Congress and the courts have used section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (text here) to enforce a collective right on the part of black people as a cohesive race to get their own majority-minority electoral districts. There are a lot of reasons why this sort of makes sense, but it’s weird and not a direct consequence of the right enumerated in the 15th Amendment.
I more or less agree with those points.
I wanted to emphasize that the VRA has a clear basis in the 15th. Even if that’s the motte to a “special representation” bailey, it is enough to keep the Act constitutional. If there’s a reversal, it’s going to be limited to the subsequent layers of tests.
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The Fifteenth Amendment protects citizens, not racial groups. It does not say, as the Gingles test does, that if enough blacks vote for the same party, that blacks must get a district. The Voting Rights Act was enacted 100 years after the end of the Civil War and has nothing to do with the rights of freed slaves.
Okay, but there is something in the Constitution which says black people deserve representation. That keeps the VRA constitutional even if subsequent tests were wrong. You’re not going to get a Dobbs-level reversal.
To be more specific, it says that people who are black get representation like everyone else; not that black people the group get representation
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No, there is not. There is something in the Constitution which says that citizens get to vote regardless of their race. This does not mean they get the representative they desire.
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