Democrats recently won a seat in Mississippi. The Supreme Court can prevent recurrence.

The controversial Voting Rights Act is on the ropes again — and it could soon suffer a crippling strike.

Supreme Court Landmark civil rights measures appear to be on the verge of making it more difficult to exercise To force states to draw districts where minority candidates have a strong chance of winning. and a key provision that allows private groups to sue under the 60-year-old law.

That would be a major blow to civil rights lawyers like Mississippi’s Carol Rhodes, who has spent her career leveraging the Voting Rights Act to increase the political power of black people and other minorities.

“It became an almost impossible mountain to climb,” Rhodes told Politico magazine.

Over the past decade or so, the VRA has been battered by a series of hits from an increasingly conservative high court. In 2013, Judges Toppled the main pillar of the law Eliminating “prior clearance” requirements for advance approval of voting changes, including redistricting in most or all of the nine states and overlapping local levels.

In recent months, petitions have piled up at the Supreme Court that could overturn the long-held right of private groups and individuals to bring cases under the law before the justices. And, earlier this month, The High Court stayed it A lower court ruled on the Voting Rights Act and gave Texas the green light to redraw its congressional map to give Republicans five more House seats at the request of President Donald Trump.

Despite those challenges, litigators like Rhodes have had significant success using the VRA. A special election in Mississippi last month that forced redistricting led to black Democrats’ lawsuits. Picking up two extra seats In the State House. The incremental gains broke the longstanding GOP supermajority in a state that is nearly 40 percent black — the highest percentage in the nation. Those kinds of advances for minority representation could be halted if the Supreme Court rules against the law.

I visited Rhodes at his law office in the small town of Hazlehurst, Miss., and asked him to take stock of the injuries the VRA had suffered, the dangers it faced at the time, and how he managed to use the law to advance minority power in his home state.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Voting Rights Act has taken several big hits from the Supreme Court over the past two decades. Many lawyers now see it as bordering on irrelevance or impotence. What is in the pending case, Louisiana v. CalaisAnd can redistricting states sometimes use race to comply with the VRA?

Some people worry that the Voting Rights Act may be on its way out, but I’m an eternal optimist. Given that the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress pursuant to the 15th Amendment, and the 15th Amendment guarantees everyone the right to vote on an equal basis, not because of race – I think so. Kalis The case that they are going to solve that case in their favor [the law] being supported.

You’ve had significant success with the Voting Rights Act in Mississippi and with the state legislature there. Does this confuse the perception that the VRA is on death’s door?

We have succeeded. Many civil rights organizations and civil rights opponents succeeded in using the Voting Rights Act to increase the number of black elected officials.

In Mississippi, for the most part, whites do not vote for black candidates in competitive elections, and so the Voting Rights Act has been very successful in creating black-majority districts.

When you have a minority population large enough, concentrated enough, and they’re in these electoral districts where they can’t elect the candidates they like—because the majority population always votes against the candidates they like—you give this large, geographically vulnerable minority group the ability to elect the representatives of their choice. And the demographics of Mississippi have made it easy for us to succeed here.

Has it had a concrete impact?

There was a time when we had 45 or 50 black people elected to the Mississippi legislature from black-majority districts. And there were black chairmen of various committees, even powerful committees. But what’s happened over the years, more and more white Democrats have left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party, so now you have [GOP] A supermajority in the Senate. We broke it in the last election.

When you break a supermajority in the Senate, money bills, especially taxes and spending, the budget, many times those bills take a supermajority to pass. If there is no supermajority, that means the Republican leadership in the Senate will have to negotiate with the black majority elected as Democrats.

Have those legislators been able to use this effective veto to actually get some spending cuts, “You’re going to spend in this part of the state or on these kinds of programs?”

We don’t know yet because the special election just happened, and the legislature comes back in January. So, we’ll see if this cohesive group of black Democrats can get some concessions.

In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Shelby County decisionThat eliminated the need for many states, including Mississippi, many places in the South and some places in the North, to submit any voting changes — including redistricting — to the Justice Department for approval. The maps that Mississippi adopted in 2022, which you successfully challenged in court, were initially put in place because Shelby County decision?

They were able to directly cause this Shelby Countyyes And John Roberts got it wrong. I agree with Justice Ginsburg who said then, it’s like standing under an umbrella and it’s not raining and saying, “Oh, it’s not raining, so you can take the umbrella down.” Roberts’ decision did just that: brought down the umbrella. And it’s raining everywhere.

The procedure was essentially abandoned later Shelby CountyThe maps had to be submitted to Washington, and that happened under both Republican and Democrat presidents. Do you think the map you challenged was approved by President Obama’s Justice Department? What about President George W. Bush’s Justice Department or President Donald Trump’s Justice Department?

The Trump Justice Department approved them, but no other president. And I’m going to go back to Obama, Biden, Clinton, I’m going to go back to Ronald Reagan. Ironically, Ronald Reagan initially opposed the expansion of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, but signed it, citing it as the crown jewel of American democracy. And so the Trump Justice Department is probably the only one, because the Trump Justice Department reversed what the purpose of the Voting Rights Act was—to protect minority voters—to say it was to protect white voters.

Roberts has now been on the court for 22 years. For the first decade and a half or so, he was uniformly viewed as an opponent of suffrage enforcement. This was seen as one of his animation issues. But there have been some decisions in recent years where courts have not been as aggressive toward the Voting Rights Act as some might have expected. It seems that Roberts went along This present Kalis The case is punishable for one yearThat basically left those districts in place through the current election cycle. Is there something going on with Roberts? Do you think he has changed or moderated anything?

My personal opinion is that he really is an incrementalist. He does not uphold longstanding precedents and what the country is used to. He believes in incremental changes and I think so Shelby County The decision came because he genuinely thought that so much progress had been made in the field that there was no longer a need for those safeguards. And I’ll think about it later Shelby County, He sees that those protections are still necessary. His views may be a bit moderate. He could see the damage Shelby County The decision has led to

You’ve got a period of four or five decades to see how these things have developed. How has technology changed this process of redistribution? Has it made it easier for those trying to disempower minority voters to do so, and have people on your side been able to use such technology to counter those efforts?

When I first started in this field, the map drawers used maps and pencils and even notepads for additions before calculators came along. Then calculators and then programs and even the social sciences have developed over the years. Statistical analysis has become more and more sophisticated, and technology has become more and more sophisticated.

My view is that whoever writes the algorithm, whoever writes the code, can write the code in such a way that it can cause more discrimination and make it harder to undo.

We have people on our side who are using technology, but in the case of Texas technology was used to draw districts that discriminated against black and Latino voters in Texas.

You were a teenager when these landmark civil rights laws were passed in the 60s. Do you have personal memories of what the Jim Crow South was like? Did any of your relatives experience one of these more bizarre tests that were used for decades to exclude black people from voting, such as, ‘How many bubbles are on a bar of soap?’ or ‘How many jelly beans are in the jar?’

Oh, yes. I was born in ’51. I grew up in a segregated neighborhood, went to an all black high school, a segregated high school, a segregated elementary school. I remember going to the dentist. And the dentist office had two entrances, one for whites, one for “colored” and going through the white side, they had air conditioning. They had magazines. The “color” side did not.

We had a field trip to the courthouse, where the courthouse had white and “colored” water fountains. And we had to sit on the balcony. I remember a third grade field trip to court and we watched a case where a white lawyer was defending a black man accused of some crime. And he said, “It was a good nigra” – nigra.

And so I grew up through it and I remember my parents too when the Voting Rights Act was first passed, and they had federal registrars around, but all the neighbors, my parents and everybody, not only did they go and register to vote, they voted in every election, no matter what.

There were people who told us stories. Tim Winston had a funeral home here and was one of the few black people able to register before the Voting Rights Act was passed, and he told stories of how he was turning black people away by asking them ridiculous questions. So, yes, I remember, personally, the stories of how hard it was before the Voting Rights Act was passed and after it was passed.

If Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is to be repealed and it is no longer a tool that can be used, what will be the strategy after that? Does this mean there are no options for civil rights groups? What would the world look like if the VRA were not available to private groups to sue?

It becomes an almost impossible mountain to climb. You have to go back to the 15th amendment and prove intentional discrimination, which is harder, or the 14th amendment and prove intentional discrimination, which is harder. All the legislature has to do is say, “We didn’t draw districts based on race. We drew based on partisanship, and they’re entitled to a presumption that there was a good faith effort to do that, and that’s difficult.” We had overwhelming evidence in Texas that favoritism was not the real reason. If that does not overcome the presumption that the legislator was acting in good faith, going forward, it will be impossible to prove a racial discrimination claim.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the federal constitution places no limits on partisan gerrymandering, even as justices continue to aggressively use race to police redistricting. Does that line make sense?

Race and party, in Mississippi, there is no distinction. This is a fantasy.