By Marc H. Morial
(Trice Edney Wire) – “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.” Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan
Instead of taking an objective look at the state of voting rights in this country that is rooted in its history to exploit rather than provide equality, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board came together to draft a piece titled Democrats Have a Jim Crow Fantasy.”
The piece suggests that the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais likely will have no meaningful impact on voting rights, basing its argument on the fact that Black voter turnout in midterms increased after Shelby v. Holder in 2013.
After cherry-picking statistics about midterm turnout in 2018 and 2022, the board had the audacity to state that “Many states in the South—including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia—have no-excuse absentee voting” while completely ignoring the fact that the administration is aggressively trying to limit absentee voting ahead of this year’s midterms.
It also failed to mention that since 2020, an election with record voter turnout because of mail-in ballots, states responded by passing a record number of voter suppression laws with tactics that include: enforcing strict voter ID laws, shown to disproportionately impact lower income voters, purging voter rolls, and in many majority Black communities, literally removing ballot boxes.
Regarding Shelby v. Holder, the piece also ignored how the decision reduced Black political participation.
Using nearly one billion individual voter‑file records, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the average county formerly subject to Section 5 preclearance, the relative participation of nonwhite voters worsened after federal oversight ended.
Critically, the study estimates that absent Shelby County, the white–Black turnout gap would have grown by only about 4–5 percentage points by 2022. Instead, it grew by roughly 9 points, nearly double what national trends alone would predict. That divergence reflects a causal effect of ending preclearance, not mere coincidence.
It doesn’t take a study to see how Louisiana v. Callais will impact Black voter representation in Congress; we can look at the arms race to redistrict the South that took place within days of the decision.
The editorial closed out by saying that “The Court’s Callais ruling may result in less racial polarization to the extent that both parties will have to compete more vigorously for minority voters rather than packing them into majority-minority districts for partisan gain.”
As we see with states immediately rushing to eliminate any competition in their newly drawn maps, its clear that the real fantasy is both parties competing for minority voters.
Louisiana went as far as to cancel its primary elections to redraw a map that could potentially eliminate all of its Black districts and Tennessee created a map that establishes a one-party system that eliminates the only sitting Black member of Congress the state has.
No one claims that today resembles 1965 Selma in form. But the data show that federal oversight mattered, and its removal disproportionately burdened minority voters.
Callais was yet another nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. It co-signs the dilution of the votes of Black communities which may result in the reduction of Black congressional representation in numbers worse than after Reconstruction.
Calling this reality a “fantasy” is not analysis; it is evasion and only underscores the urgency of restoring the protections that once enforced them.
