*Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the court, gave a history lesson on the enactment of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment during her second day on the bench.
Jackson explored this history as the court heard arguments in a dispute over Alabama’s congressional districts map (Merrill v. Milligan), NBC News reports. The case centers on legislative maps that favor white voters by packing Black voters into a single congressional district which gravely impacts their voting power. This discriminatory practice is prohibited by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
There are seven congressional districts in Alabama, but Black Alabamans can vote in only one of them. The state is fighting to keep it this way however Vox reports that two different sets of plaintiffs say the congressional maps violate the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits race discrimination in voting.
Jackson’s line of questioning in the voting rights case came during an oral argument on Alabama’s defense of its map, which a lower court said discriminated against Black voters. On Tuesday, the state argued that the lower court’s ruling was incorrect.
READ MORE: Ketanji Brown Jackson Joins A Supreme Court in Turmoil | VIDEO
More KBJ: The 14th Amendment “was drafted to give a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation” that used “race-conscious” remedies to make Freedman equal to white citizens. So how could the Voting Rights Act’s race-conscious remedies possibly be unconstitutional? pic.twitter.com/JWF4g0me0f
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) October 4, 2022
As reported by BET, during an exchange with Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour, Jackson noted that the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are directly related to the issue of race. Jackson said that “the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves.”
“When I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way,” she said.
Jackson explained that the 14th Amendment was drafted “to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the freedmen, during the Reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.”
She continued, “I looked at the report that was submitted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the 14th Amendment, and that report says that the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves.”
Per The Guardian, Jackson “challenged LaCour’s argument that the prohibition against racial discrimination in the constitution’s 14th amendment does not allow mapmakers to consider race in redistricting,” the outlet writes, adding “But Jackson questioned how that could be the case when history shows that the 14th amendment was adopted as part of a race-conscious effort to guarantee equal rights for Black Americans in the 19th century.”
“I don’t think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed race neutrality or race blindness was required,” Jackson said. “It was drafted to give a foundational, a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation that was designed to make people who had less opportunity and less rights equal to white citizens.
“I’m trying to understand why that violates the 14th amendment given the history and background of the 14th amendment,” she added.
As Vox reports, Alabama is likely to lose this case.
The outlet also notes that “several of the justices, including Roberts, Barrett, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, seemed to spend the morning casting about for a way to rule in Alabama’s favor without explicitly overruling nearly four decades of established voting rights law stretching back to the Court’s decision in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986).”
Listen to the clip of Jackson via the Twitter embed above.
We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!
