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Clyburn: Roberts to join ranks of ‘infamous’ Supreme Court justices over voting rights decision

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by Tara Suter - 05/10/26 12:44 PM ET

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by Tara Suter - 05/10/26 12:44 PM ET

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Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) claimed that Supreme Court Justice Chief John Roberts will join the ranks of “infamous” high court justices over a recent decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act.

“I never thought I would see the day that the United States Supreme Court would be so openly partisan with what it’s been doing,” Clyburn told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” Sunday.

“And I really believe if you look at all of these decisions, and you look at the history of the country, I think that Justice Roberts is going to take his place alongside some other infamous justices like [former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger] Taney, who gave us the Dred Scott decision,” he added.

Taney authored the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which found that enslaved Black people were not citizens and therefore couldn’t sue in federal courts. Scott was an enslaved Black person that sued for his freedom after he was taken to and lived in Illinois, where slavery was not allowed.

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that enslaved people could not have rights as citizens.

Democrats have ripped the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which declared the state’s addition of a second majority-Black congressional district an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The 6-3 April decision weakened a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has historically enabled advocacy groups to force the creation of majority-minority districts. The recent decision does not get rid of the provision as a whole, with Justice Samuel Alito, who delivered the opinion, portraying it as an “update” to the framework that has governed Voting Rights Act cases for decades.

In turn, a number of Republicans in Southern states have sought to draw new congressional lines ahead of the November midterm elections.

Clyburn has criticized these efforts in his home state of South Carolina, where state lawmakers left the door open to possible redistricting.

“Republicans in the South Carolina state legislature began the process of extending their session to allow for the redrawing of the state’s congressional map — with one goal in mind: eliminating the state’s only Democratic House district that is occupied by a Democrat,” Clyburn said in a series of posts on the social platform X last week.

“Republicans are trying to break apart South Carolina’s 6th District. Not because voters demanded it, but because Donald Trump requested it,” the lawmaker said, adding that “we cannot let them succeed.”

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