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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.
In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.
This is like saying that if I ban my employees from wearing turbans during work then I'm not discriminating against Sikh Men, even though Sikh Men are the ones who are going to be hit by the change almost exclusively. All I've done is laundered religious prejudice through an apparently neutral criteria. Shame on the 6 ideological justices.
This is just disparate impact. I agree with Gail / Richard here that any possible standard you can think of has a disparate impact, and that its bad and dumb and makes no sense.
Politically I am fine with disparate impact when the country was 85/15 white/black. But it doesn’t work at all after the migration of last 40 years.
That being said VRA has always been unconstitutional allow with all racial discrimination.
IIRC a number of noisy affirmative-action opponents have said they would be willing to hold noses and support a compromise where affirmative action (and laws like disparate impact that de facto mandate it) was credibly restricted to ADOS blacks and tribally enrolled native Americans.
This isn't going to happen because
But affirmative action in favour of poorly assimilated immigrant-descended sub-populations is one of the most socially corrosive things you can do.
This seems like a deeper explanation of what I said works for me. Logically the two groups are different. Natives and blacks aren’t here by choice so finding a way to get them to have special representation that they couldn’t earn on their own makes some sense.
The reason you left out is the ratio we would have today with more groups claiming they need special accommodations. You can have functional institutions when 15% of the people have special status but the other 85% are assimilated whites who would still have comfortable governing majorities. It would be like 60-40 today. You lose the comfortable majority to govern today. The less the ratio is “meritocratic” and the more it is “special privilege” the worse the system becomes.
Worse than that because women are affirmative-action eligible.
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