CNN by Joan Biskupic 10/16/2025
After an impassioned set of arguments Wednesday over the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the question is whether Justice Brett Kavanaugh is willing to completely dismantle a law intended to ensure equal voting power for Blacks and other racial minorities.
Kavanaugh appears to be the pivotal justice in the Louisiana case, just as he was two years ago in a similar redistricting dispute from Alabama. He and Chief Justice John Roberts, who has demonstrated his own ambivalences on the VRA, worked together on a surprising compromise in 2023 that preserved the force of the landmark act.
But now as the stakes have risen, Kavanaugh’s doubts have deepened.
He questioned whether there should be time limits on the creation of “majority-minority” districts, long employed to remedy congressional district maps that diluted the voting power of Blacks and Hispanics and to give them an opportunity to elect a preferred candidate.
“This court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” Kavanaugh said.
He also queried whether maps that might appear racially discriminatory may, in fact, be driven by partisan politics, not race.
Yet, Kavanaugh was wrestling with the consequences of the vote he might cast. He seized upon an assertion of NAACP Legal Defense Fund counsel Janai Nelson that the retrenchment on VRA racial remedies would be “catastrophic” for Black representation in Congress and state offices.
In speeches over the years, Kavanaugh has touted his awareness of race and said he regards his cases that address bias to be the most significant he’s written. He has also invoked Atticus Finch, the fictional, small-town Alabama lawyer fighting a racist system in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
On Wednesday, his liberal colleagues especially picked up on themes Kavanaugh raised. It was Justice Elena Kagan who pointedly first asked Nelson what would happen “on the ground” if states were no longer required to draw Black-majority districts to correct discriminatory maps.
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