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Ketanji Brown Jackson Invokes 14th Amendment History During Supreme Court Voting Rights Hearing

Participating in her second day of oral arguments on Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tangled with Alabama’s solicitor general in a case challenging Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination in voting policies.

The justices agreed to review a lower court’s opinion that found Alabama’s redrawn 2021 congressional map was likely a violation of the law because it includes only one majority Black district out of seven, despite the fact that Black voters account for 27% of the state’s voting population.

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In court Tuesday, Edmund LaCour, Alabama’s solicitor general, argued that the map was “race-neutral,” and that the order for a new map would put the state at odds with the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution because it would have to prioritize race in redistricting.

Jackson wondered why LaCour would make such a claim given that framers of the 14th Amendment — which guaranteed equal protection to all people, including former slaves — did not intend it to be “race-neutral or race-blind.”

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She said the framers themselves adopted the Equal Protection Clause “in a race-conscious way.”

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{snip} “That’s the point of that act, to make sure that the other citizens, the Black citizens, would have the same [rights] as the white citizens.”

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