The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) condemns in the strongest terms the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. This decision represents a mortal wounding of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
Section 2 of the Act served as a bulwark against racist electoral districting and as a remedy for the dilution of Black and minority votes in favor of white votes. Gutting the last remaining section of the VRA is a direct assault on the rights and power of the Black people of the Black Belt. We know from history that this decision will unleash the systemic disenfranchisement of Black voters specifically in the South. Building on his decades-long effort to destroy the VRA, Chief Justice Roberts is leading the Court on a transparent mission to lock in Republican rule and enable the formal resegregation of the United States. This white-supremacist agenda is not confined to “Red” states or “Blue” states; no voter and no election will be spared the impact of this ruling.
We condemn the bad-faith reasoning of Callais, which like Shelby County v. Holder before it, purports that the VRA is obsolete due to “dramatic changes” in the South that have erased the remnants of chattel slavery and Jim Crow. This is not a legitimate finding of fact, nor even a genuinely held belief on the part of the majority. As the majority well knows, Callais itself is evidence anti-Black racism still defines and influences U.S. political and legal culture. The NLG condemns the jurisprudence of gaslighting. The Federalist Society, an organization built on racist reaction to Brown v. Board and the era of substantive due process, has striven to restore segregation one “facially neutral” decision at a time. This bluff at the heart of originalism requires other lawyers to play along. We urge liberal, progressive and radical lawyers, law professors, and law students to undermine the right’s agenda wherever possible by refusing to treat racist revanchism like earnest legal interpretation.
Decades of struggle by Black people and their allies to fight for equality culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act which preserved via the ballot box the collective power they won in the streets and in mass collective action. Countless people who stood up for these rights and protections were injured and killed by law enforcement and white supremacist vigilantes. The NLG will always stand with the Black Liberation Movement and our Southern siblings.
The National Lawyers Guild continues to support the activists pushing back against fascist overreach as we did during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. We will defeat this authoritarian regime and their billionaire backers the same way our elders and ancestors in the struggle fought against South African Apartheid, Nazism, Jim Crow, and slavery: together.
Signed,
Executive Council
