The Supreme Court listened to oral arguments for the Louisiana v. Callais case.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made an absurd comment because, of course, she did.
First, the background.
The ACLU, with 12 black plaintiffs, sued Louisiana after the state redrew its congressional map because only one district ended up with a majority minority:
This case started back in 2022, when the ACLU and our partners sued Louisiana for violating the Voting Rights Act by illegally packing Black Louisianans into one congressional district. After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision that said we were likely to succeed in proving our case, the Louisiana legislature enacted a new congressional map containing two majority Black districts.In 2024, a group of white Louisianans challenged this new map as a racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth Amendment. A district court struck down the new map, but we successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for an emergency stay on the district court’s order, ensuring that Louisiana voters had a map with two majority-Black congressional districts for the 2024 election.The court will now rule on the constitutionality of drawing majority-Black districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
First off, no, Jackson did not call black people disabled.
However, Jackson did say that not having race-based districts is like disabled people not being able to access anything before the ADA:
Kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA. Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities, and so it was discriminatory, in effect, because these folks were not able to access these buildings, and it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building or the person who owned the building intended for them to be exclusionary, that’s irrelevant. Congress said the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities, if readily possible.I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. The idea in section two is that we are responding to current day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system, right? They’re disabled.
In other words, not having race-based districts disables them from voting.
Either way, what a stupid comparison.
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