A Turning Point For Section 2: SCOTUS Reins in the Voting Rights Act

The Libertarian

The Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin

History, News, Politics

4.7 • 994 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2026

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

Charles C. W. Cooke and Richard Epstein break down the Supreme Court’s latest Voting Rights Act decision, examining how the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais narrows the use of race in redistricting and marks a turning point in election law. Epstein argues that the Court has finally begun to rein in what he sees as decades of overreach, tracing the evolution of voting rights jurisprudence from the Civil Rights era to today and questioning whether majority-minority districts have outlived their original purpose. The conversation explores the legal foundations of racial gerrymandering, the unintended political consequences of engineered districts, and the broader implications for polarization, representation, and the future of redistricting in the United States.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Libertarian. I'm Charles C.W. Kirk, and I'm here with the Libertarian himself,
0:16.1	Richard Epstein. Richard, welcome to your own show.
0:19.3	It's always been nice to be welcome by you, Charlie.
0:21.9	Thank you. This is a production of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
0:29.5	Today, we're going to talk about a Supreme Court case that came down just three hours ago.
0:35.8	Louisiana v. Calais. This is a V. Rights Act case, specifically. It was a
0:41.6	case about Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We had actually discussed this on our Supreme Court
0:48.6	preview on Law Talk. If you don't listen to that show, please subscribe there too.
0:54.5	And the Supreme Court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create the additional majority-minority district that it had been ordered to create because no compelling interest mandated the state to use race in creating its new maps.
1:14.2	It did create the new maps based on race, and as a result, its map was an unconstitutional,
1:20.7	racial gerrymander. The broader takeaway from this is that while Section 2 has not been
1:26.9	completely killed, its use
1:30.2	jurisprudentially has been narrowed. So Richard, what do you think of the majority's
1:36.4	conclusion here and how is it going to change our jurisprudence and our politics?
1:42.0	Well, I've always been strongly in favor of this particular view.
1:45.6	What happens is, if you go back to 1965, there were all sorts of egregious behaviors that are to be
1:51.6	corrected for by the voting rights have. And the history of it was the things that really were terrible,
1:57.7	they corrected. So you couldn't keep blacks away from the polls and not let
2:01.8	them vote and you had to give people registration and you couldn't have poll taxes and stuff like that.
2:07.0	And the problem was once you solve the basic problem of getting people to the bowls, which was what
2:12.3	all the earlier grievances were about, essentially the task of Section 2 was probably done. But what happened is the mission
2:20.3	moved during the course of this entire discussion so that it wasn't just the question of getting
	...

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