Senate

Supreme Court decision on VRA ‘sent us backwards in time’: Booker

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by TheHill.com - 05/10/26 4:21 PM ET

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by TheHill.com - 05/10/26 4:21 PM ET

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Democratic Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) said Sunday that the Supreme Court sent the country “backwards in time” by declaring Louisiana’s addition of a second majority-Black congressional district an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The high court ruled last month, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 only applies to “intentional” racial discrimination in the drawing of congressional maps.

“The Voting Rights Act was perhaps one of the most important acts in the history of our country in securing our democratic ideals: All are created equal, all are imbued with certain unalienable rights,” Booker told host Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“And what [the Supreme Court has] done right now is sent us backwards in time, back to the 1870s and ’80s, where the South and southern legislators, through terrorism, intimidation and worse were able to stop African-Americans from having representation in Congress,” the New Jersey Democrat added.

Booker also called the decision “as wrong as” Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. United States. In those two cases, the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine and upheld the federal government’s exclusion of individuals of Japanese descent from military areas on the West Coast, respectively.

The recent decision invalidated Louisiana’s congressional map, drawn in 2024, but has also had implications nationwide.

Republicans in the Tennessee General Assembly this week passed a map, which Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed into law on Thursday, that carves up the state’s only majority-Black district, represented by Rep. Steve Cohen (D). The lone Democrat in Tennessee’s nine-member House delegation vowed to fight the map in court.

In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the ruling is merely an “update” to the Gingles framework of Section 2, which the Supreme Court established in the 1980s to decide challenges to the law.

Alito also wrote that such an update is necessary because of historical developments over the last four decades, including “vast social change” in the South, the use of computers in drawing congressional maps and the high court ruling in 2019 that federal judges cannot strike down maps as partisan gerrymanders.

“In light of these developments, the Court updates the Gingles framework and realigns it with the text of [Section 2] and constitutional principles,” Alito wrote.

But Justice Elena Kagan, joined in dissent by fellow liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, had a different view. Kagan wrote in her dissenting opinion that the decision “renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

She added, “If other States follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”

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