When the United States Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act meant to preserve minority voting power, it sent shockwaves throughout the political landscape. 
In the 6-3 ruling – handed down Wednesday – the court determined that Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-Black district in the state amounted to an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
With the nation embroiled in an ongoing battle over the extent to which public institutions can consider race to remedy past injustices and ensure equal protection under the law, legal scholars have been railing the high-court’s ruling as one that could set the nation back by diluting the voting power of racial minorities at not just the state level, but potentially in local elections as well.
Vinay Harpalani, the Don L. & Mabel F. Dickason Endowed Chair in Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law, told The EDU Ledger that the decision means “Black people will have less political power, because they will have less opportunity to elect Black members of Congress, or other members of their choosing,”
“This will particularly be the case in Republican-leaning states with large Black populations, which is much of the South,” Harpalani said. “And since the Court continues to allow partisan gerrymandering, states will likely be able to attribute the dilution of Black voting power to mere dilution of Democratic voting power: a partisan issue rather than a racial issue.”
Here’s a roundup of what other legal scholars have been saying about the decision:
Kristen Clarke, the Earl C. and Anna H. Broady Chair at Howard University School of Law, said in a statement issued in her role as NAACP legal counsel that the ruling “defies precedent, ignores statutory text, and will reverse decades of progress we have made as a nation.”
