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SCOTUS backs Voting Rights Act
In a surprising decision on Thursday, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of voting rights advocates, deciding — in a 5-to-4 vote — that Alabama has carved up the congressional map to dilute the power of Black voters.
What’s this case about? After conducting the census in 2020, the deep-red state left only one out of seven districts majority Black despite the fact that Black voters make up 27% of the vote statewide.
A lower appeals court had previously ruled against Alabama, saying the map needed to be redrawn to be more favorable to Black residents. SCOTUS, for its part, last year put its decision on hold, meaning that the US midterm elections were held according to this now-defunct gerrymandered map.
Indeed, the outcome — in which Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, two conservatives, sided with the court’s three liberal justices — surprised many who feared that the majority-conservative court might back Republican-dominated states trying to strip back the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
Still, in handing down his decision, Roberts wrote that there were remaining concerns that the original law in question “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States.” But for now, it sets a precedent for other states trying to pull similar tricks.
Want to learn more? Tune in here to Ian Bremmer’s interview with Yale Law School Senior Research Fellow Emily Bazelon on the latest episode of GZERO World. Bazelon, the host of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast, unpacks some of the big cases argued before the court this term.
West Virginia v. EPA ruling hampers climate change action
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his analysis on US politics:
This week's question, what are the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in the case of West Virginia v. EPA?
It's been a busy term for the Supreme Court, topped off this week with a ruling on the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.
The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA did not have the properly congressionally delegated authority to regulate carbon emissions. This will hamper the ability of the Biden administration to act on climate change in the absence of congressional action, which we do not expect. And more broadly could have implications for other agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
At issue is the agency's ability to regulate in cases where Congress has not specifically laid out that they should. This is known as delegation from Congress to the agencies. And in the past, the courts have given the agencies wide latitude to pass new rules in cases where congressional statutes were ambiguous.
However, under the more conservative courts that were appointed by President Donald Trump, the courts are turning back these abilities. And a concurring opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch laid out a series of tests that limit the ability of agencies to act.
The conservatives think that courts have allowed agencies to have too much power and would prefer to see those powers concentrated in the hands of the elected representatives in Congress. Liberals argue that the administrative state requires specialized expertise to create complex rules to regulate industries that cannot be administered properly by the more political branches of government.
This will affect not only regulations dealing with climate change, but also future workplace safety regulations, such as the vaccine mandate that President Biden tried to force on large employers earlier this year, the SEC's ability to force disclosures of climate risk by publicly traded companies, and rulemaking that the Federal Trade Commission hopes to do. They're pushing data privacy standards and break up highly concentrated industries.
More broadly, with this decision and the decision to overturning Roe v. Wade, the court has indicated that it is willing to overturn years of precedent and set US policy making on a fundamentally different and more limited path.