Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gives history lesson on 14th Amendment

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave a history lesson to the Alabama Solicitor General on Tuesday, who was challenging Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination in voting policies.

The justices in the nation’s highest court heard two hours of arguments in the latest showdown seeking to force Alabama to create a second Black majority congressional district. About 27% of Alabamians are Black, but they form a majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

The court’s conservatives, in a 5-4 vote in February, blocked a lower court ruling that would have required a second Black majority district in time for the November elections. A similar ruling to create an additional Black majority district in Louisiana also was put on hold.

In just her second day on the bench, Jackson eloquently dismantled the claim that the 14th Amendment, which forms the legal bedrock of the push for civil rights, was supposed to be racially neutral.

“The framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in a race-conscious way,” Jackson said. “They were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who were discriminated against, (the freed former slaves), were actually brought equal to everyone else.”

The first Black woman to sit on the nation’s top court insisted that the primary purpose of the post-Civil War edict was to empower freed Black slaves to overturn a system of violent white oppression.

“That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind remedy,” Jackson said confidently.

Some conservative justices seemed sympathetic to Alabama’s arguments. “Where can the state win?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer who was arguing against Alabama.

The court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson pushed back strongly against Alabama’s arguments. Kagan referred to the Voting Rights Act as not only “an important statute” but “one of the great achievements of American democracy” while acknowledging that recent Supreme Court cases have cut back on the law. “Now, in recent years, the statute has fared not well in this court,” she said.

“The framers recognized that people … based on their race were being treated unequally,” Jackson lectured. “And importantly, when there was a concern that (it) wouldn’t have a constitutional foundation, that’s when the 14th Amendment came into play.”

The arguments were the first Supreme Court case involving race for Jackson. A challenge to affirmative action in college admissions is set for arguments on Oct. 31.

With News Wire Services