Front Burner - The end of the Voting Rights Act?

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, passed in 1964 and 1965 respectively, marked the beginning of multi-racial democracy in the United States. But in the decades since, those achievements have been steadily contested. Just days ago, The U.S. Supreme Court dealt yet another blow to the Voting Rights Act with a decision regarding the Louisiana congressional map. Many experts say the Voting Rights Act is facing an existential moment where it stands to be narrowed, marginalized, and legislated out of relevancy, or even existence. Ari Berman is the voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones and the author of a number of books on the history of the subject, most recently Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

You know that feeling when you reach the end of a really good true crime series? You want to know more, more about the people involved, where the case is now, and what it's like behind the scenes. I get that. I'm Kathleen Goldhar and on my podcast crime story, I speak with the leading storytellers of true crime to dig deeper into the cases we all just can't stop thinking about. Find crime story wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hey everybody, I'm Jamie Pusson. The United States has, in many ways, only functioned as a full democracy for about 60 years.

Before then, it was functionally an apartheid state in which millions of people, particularly black Americans, were systematically denied full political participation and equal citizenship on the basis of race. Then came the civil rights movement, which included a passage of two pieces of legislation designed to change this. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Two bills, which are responsible for ending the regime of apartheid and formalizing a system of multiracial democracy.

This period was referred to by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a second emancipation. But in the decades since, those achievements have been steadily contested. And now, under the Trump administration and after a series of Supreme Court ruling, many experts say that the Voting Rights Act is facing an existential moment, narrowed, marginalized, and legislated out of relevancy, or even existence. Ari Berman is the Voting Rights correspondent at Mother Jones, an author of a number of books on the history of voting rights in America. Most recently, Minority Rule, the right-wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to

resist it. Ari, it's really great to have you back on Front Burner. Thank you so much for making the time. Hi, Jamie. Thank you for having me back. So I know that last week Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said the following. The Voting Rights Act is, or now more accurately, was one of the most consequential exercises of federal legislative power in our nation's history. But given that this is a Canadian podcast and we're speaking to a largely Canadian audience, why don't we begin by explaining what exactly the Voting Rights Act is and what it did to American life and why it remains so important? today. Yeah, so your listeners are probably familiar with the fact that during the Jim Crow era in America, black Americans were disenfranchised across the South. Black men briefly had the right to vote

during the Civil War, but that was violently taken away. And we had things like literacy tests and poll taxes and grandfather clauses and all white primaries. And what it meant was that they were effectively no black voters in most southern states for a very long period of time, nearly 100 years, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. And the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended that situation by getting rid of those suppressive devices, getting rid of those poll taxes and literacy tests, for example, by allowing black Americans in the South to register to vote, many for the first time and ultimately leading to a huge change in representation in America, making it possible, for example, to elect the first black president.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, who still questions the power of our democracy. Tonight is your answer. And so what the Voting Rights Act did was really make multiracial democracy possible in the United States. And this is going to be a conversation focused on more than one case, but there has been a lot made about a recent Supreme Court decision in the state of Louisiana. You've said as a result of this move that, quote, we could see the largest drop in black representation since the end of Reconstruction. one you called a death blow to the Voting Rights Act, and that could take us back to the Jim Crow era.

So many martyrs. And this decision today by the Supreme Court is a slap in the face of those who worked so hard to push our country closer to its ideals. Can you walk me through what happened and why the Supreme Court ruled in the way that it did? Yes. So basically what it did is it struck. a district in Louisiana that was a majority black district. The justices issuing a ruling on a case out of Louisiana involving the Voting Rights Act, redistricting, and whether states must end any consideration of race when redrawing congressional maps, the decision potentially reducing the influence of minority voters and minority representation

in Congress. Basically, what you need to understand is voting in the South in America remains. very racially polarized, meaning that by and large, white people will not vote for a black candidate, particularly if that black candidate is a Democrat. And so the only way a black candidate can get elected is if they represent a majority black district or something close to it in a southern state for the U.S. House of Representatives or for local legislative districts. And what the Supreme Court said in this Louisiana case was that a second majority black district in Louisiana was unconstitutional.

What that means is that is now a green light for not just Louisiana, but other states in the south and across the country more broadly, to eliminate those districts, which are known as majority minority districts, district in which candidates of color or voters of color are a majority. And so that could lead to a big drop in black representation. We're already seeing southern states redraw their maps following this decision. to eliminate these kind of districts. And what it's going to mean is there's going to be fewer black members of Congress. There's going to be more white members of Congress as a result. And there's going to be more Republicans than Democrats elected from these southern states as a result. Just looking at Louisiana as an example, the three biggest cities in the state are New Orleans, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge, each of which are majority black.

It's home to all kinds of parishes in major cities in which black people constitute a majority population. And so how would it kind of materially impact the state today, you think? Well, it would lead to an underrepresentation of black voters in Louisiana. I mean, that was the basic issue in the case was that before this second majority black district was created, black Louisianaans were underrepresented. And so when they had two congressional districts, they were roughly represented equal to their population. The U.S. doesn't have proportional representation, but just, Generally speaking, the idea is if districts can be created that give people of color their ability to elect their candidates of choice, that should be done under the Voting Rights Act.

Now, the Supreme Court has basically turned that on its head and said that is unconstitutional. That represents a form of race discrimination, that you're unconstitutionally considering race as a factor in drawing legislative districts. Now, one would argue that the whole purpose of the Voting Rights Act was to consider race to end the legacy and stain of racism in America, but the Supreme Court has said that that's no longer something you can really consider. The court, as I understand it, seems to be making the argument here, as I think you've just said, that it's unconstitutional to create a congressional district. congressional districts that are reflective of the demographic majority. But the slight of hand here seems to be that the court is saying that these congressional districts are not being denied because they were majority black, but because they are historically majority Democrat. And conservative court justes are couching their case in partisanship rather than race. And just,

is that right? And what do you make of that? I think that is right in terms of what they're arguing. The problem is those are very hard things to disentangle. because, like I said, voting is so racially polarized in the South in America that basically black voters tend to support Democrats. And so what the Supreme Court is saying is, well, if you go after black voters, that's just because they're going after Democrats. But the net effect is that one racial group in particular is being discriminated against based on who they support politically. And the worry here is that now you're going to have white legislators that are going to target black voters. And they're going to say, oh, we're just doing this because of party rather than race. And therefore, it's legal.

Now, the odd thing about America compared to other countries is it's legal in America to basically do political gerrymandering, to draw districts that favor one party over another because of what the Supreme Court has said in other. cases. Other countries don't allow that. We unfortunately do. And the fact that we allow that kind of partisan gerrymandering has opened the door to make it easier to then target certain racial groups as well under the guise of partisanship. Also, as I understand it, much of this comes down to section two of the Voting Rights Act, which was established to prohibit voting practices which discriminate on the basis of race. As you've said, the section has long been understood to prevent the drawing of electoral maps that dilute the voting strength of minority communities.

But even when there's no direct evidence of racist intent, if that has been the longstanding tradition, just talk to me a little bit about what changed. Well, what changed was really just the composition of this Supreme Court. I mean, that is the only thing that has changed. Parts of the Voting Rights Act were temporary and had. to be reauthorized. And so after the law was signed in 1965, it was reauthorized on four different occasions by the Congress. Interestingly enough, all four of those reauthorizations were signed by Republican presidents. So this was a law that had strong bipartisan support. But the Supreme Court in America has changed. It's gotten much more conservative. First through appointees of

George W. Bush, that is John Roberts and Sam Alito. And then through appointees of Donald Trump, that is Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney-Barratt, and they have begun steadily weakening the Voting Rights Act. They did it in three different decisions in 2013 and 2021 and then now in 2026. And so this is a court that I would argue is broadly hostile to civil rights laws in America, broadly hostile to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and has a view of discrimination that is much more sympathetic to the rights of white people than the rights of. previously disenfranchised minority communities. And I just want to get a sense of like the impact of this. You've noted in your writing that this could end up costing up to 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus their seats and up to 200 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the South could be compromised.

This would leave no Democratic representatives or any black majority districts across states including Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, the regions of the country with the highest population of black people. I mean, just how significant would this be? It would be hugely significant because you would be talking about states with huge black populations that have no black representatives. Mississippi, for example, is 40% black and could have not a single black member of Congress. And that means that these communities are not going to be. represented. And it's going to lead to a huge rollback in representation for groups that were previously disenfranchised that fought incredibly hard to get the right to vote and then suddenly

could have it taken away. It's very akin to what happened during the Jim Crow era in America in which you had black members of Congress who were elected during the reconstruction period. And then white Southerners fought back against that. They fought back. They fought back. through violence, they rigged voting, and then they changed their state constitutions to prevent black people from voting. And we're already seeing southern states begin to do things like that. We're already seeing states in the wake of the Supreme Court decision redraw their maps. Florida Governor Ronda Santos says he has signed a newly approved congressional map as part of the nationwide redistricting battle.

Tennessee's Republican governor called state lawmakers to Nashville this week for a special session to review the state's congressional lines. Other states like Alabama and Louisiana are also taking similar steps that could give the GOP more power in Washington. Some are going to be able to do it for this midterm election in 2026. Some are going to have to do it afterwards. But all of them have indicated they are going to do this. And so there's no doubt this is going to lead to a major rollback in representation for black Americans, for other communities of color. And it's going to lead to a larger redistricting war in America.

where just states are just redrawing maps all the time now for partisan benefit. And that's just going to deepen the polarization and the partisanship that this country is facing right now. You know that feeling when you reach the end of a really good true crime series? You want to know more, more about the people involved, where the case is now, and what it's like behind the scenes. I get that. I'm Kathleen Goldhar and on my podcast Crime Story, I speak with the leading storytellers of true crime to dig deeper into the cases we all just can't stop thinking about. Find crime story wherever you get your podcasts.

Before this latest ruling, the most consequential contemporary decision regarding voting rights was a case known as Shelby County v. Holder. And can you walk us through that case and how it changed the enforcement of voting rights over the past decade? Yeah, what the Supreme Court said in Shelby County v. Holder was that those states with the longest history of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. So Chief Justice John Roberts summarized his opinion in four telling words. Here they are. Our country has changed. There was a part of the Voting Rights Act that required states that had this history of discrimination, like Alabama, Mississippi, the southern states in particular, that they had to approve their, changes to their voting because the people that passed the Voting Rights Act understood that once you outlawed a literacy test or a poll tax in Mississippi or Alabama, they were just going to try to pass a new one. And therefore, it put the onus on the states themselves to prove that they were

no longer discriminating. And so that was really the most important part of the Voting Rights Act. It actually stopped discrimination before it occurred. It was like stopping a crime before it had committed, been committed. And the Supreme Court got rid of that. And so now if Louisiana or Mississippi or whatever the state may be in the South wants to pass a new redistricting map or wants to make a change to their voting process, they no longer have to approve that with the federal government. And of course, the court has now gone much further and said, well, now you can actually eliminate representation for communities of color, which would have been previously illegal under multiple different parts of the Voting Rights Act.

You mentioned before that this iteration of this Supreme Court is hostile to the rights of black voters. I want to talk to you specifically about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who has served in the role for more than 20 years now. He is conservative and he cut his teeth as a young lawyer working as an official in Reagan's administration. You have said that the rolling back of the civil rights movement represents the culmination of Roberts' legal career. what leads you to that conclusion and how has Justice Roberts informed the opinion of the court and really the national dialogue more broadly? Well, Roberts came of age as a counter-revolutionary in the Reagan administration. He came of age as a young lawyer who was challenging the civil rights laws of the 1960s. And when he joined the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan, one of his main portfolios was the Voting Rights Act. And the Reagan administration was locked in a big fight with Congress over whether to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and how strong the Voting Rights Act should be. And Roberts took the position that it should be as weak as possible. In his words, a violation of of the Voting Rights Act should not be made too easy to prove. And so he wrote memo after memo

arguing against a strong interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. He actually lost that fight. Congress overwhelmingly reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. When he was nominated as Chief Justice, he said he had no problems with the constitutionality of the law, but it became very clear in his opinions that he still had a very strong point of view in this case. And in the issue of race more broadly. He said in another case, the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race to stop discriminating on the basis of race, meaning that he believed that any consideration of race in American society, even to remedy historic discrimination, was in and of itself racist. And that was a very different view of the civil rights era, because if you talk to people that were sympathetic to the

civil rights movement, they would say, we have to consider race to get beyond it, right? That we have this legacy of racism and we have to rectify it through things like the Voting Rights Act. But Roberts and his fellow conservatives came to view things like the Voting Rights Act as part of the problem rather than the solution. What happened? Well, some think that the ruling can create more Republican held congressional seats in the South. That's good.

That's the kind of ruling I like. When did that happen? How would you characterize Trump's historical attitude on the question? of voting rights and civil rights legislation more broadly. And have you seen a difference between his first and second administrations on this question? Well, I would say it would be just broadly hostile. I mean, he said, you know, white people have been treated very badly. I think he has that view that if there's any discrimination, it's it's white people that have been discriminated against. The New York Times reporter, David, saying, or asked Trump, do you believe that the civil rights

protections Americans had starting in the 60s and so forth resulted ultimately in the discrimination against white men. The president responded, well, I think that a lot of people were very badly treated. White people were very badly treated where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university or a college. You've seen him do that through the people he's appointed to his administration. His second administration has been far more hostile to voting rights than his first administration. For example, people that believe the 2020 election was stolen have been put into positions all across the administration. The Department of Justice. which enforces civil rights laws and voting rights laws has been completely gutted. There's almost

no staff left, for example, at the voting section of the civil rights division. There's almost no enforcement of civil rights laws itself. And so you have to understand this decision on the voting rights act as part of this larger rollback of civil rights in America that is being led by the Trump administration. Right. Talk to me a little bit more about that. Like, In your own writing, following this ruling in Louisiana, you describe it as arriving at a moment when Trump and his allies are taking increasingly aggressive steps around the administration of elections, from efforts to obtain sensitive voter rule information to supporting new voting restrictions to rhetoric around nationalizing voting itself. And just talk to me more about how you see this all fitting together. Well, the Constitution gives a lot of power to the states to run. run elections in America with oversight from Congress. And what President Trump has tried to do is he's tried

to centralize control over voting in the executive branch, which is not traditionally how American democracy has worked and not what the Constitution says. And so Trump has tried to take control of voting in all sorts of different ways from sending the FBI out to take ballot boxes in places like Georgia, to calling on states all across the country, to draw new redistricting maps to give Republicans more support to having new investigations into the 2020 election so that he can potentially then say that election was rigged, so therefore we need to have more restrictive voting laws for future elections. I mean, a lot of this is really unprecedented in terms of an American president playing such a major role in trying to roll back voting rights and being so explicit

this is being basically done to benefit his party. Do you have any concern around the legitimacy of the upcoming midterms this fall? There's fears, of course, that votes could be rigged or interfered with in some way. I have concerns about what the administration might do, for example. Will they send law enforcement to polling places, which has never been done before? Will they try to seize voting machines? Will they try to stop ballot counting? Trump has talked about these kind of things. He tried to do some of these things or considered doing some of these things in 2020. And people that urged him to do it are now in senior roles in his administration. And so, yeah, I think anyone who follows American elections right now is very concerned.

about how far the president might go to keep his party in power. I mean, the gerrymandering was part of this. It was part of an effort to try to predetermine election outcomes. And if they've, if they've been this aggressive in trying to keep their majorities through one strategy, it would follow that they're going to use other strategies as well as we get closer to the election to try to make sure the election goes their way. I just want to come back squarely to the Voting Rights Act here. Both of the principal pieces of legislation, which went on to codify the gains of the civil rights movement into law, were ultimately passed into law by a Southern Democrat president named Lyndon Baines Johnson or LBJ. I urge every American to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our

our people and to bring peace to our land. My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail. Let us close the springs of racial poison. The image of President Johnson shaking hands with Martin Luther King, Jr., just after signing the Civil Rights Act into law is etched into, like, the national memory in the U.S., but despite this, LBJ was a racist. according to his Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Robert Caro, he used the N-word often and is reported to have referred to some of the legislation we've talked about as so-called N-word bills privately.

When you think about that contradiction that the architect of these laws was himself a purveyor of the kinds of racist attitudes that these laws were trying to protect against, what does it say to you about how these laws came to be and how durable they were from the beginning? Well, LBJ is a very complicated figure in American politics, and we need more than one podcast to be able to discuss how complicated his legacy is. I think as a white southerner, he was both drawn to the best and worst impulses of the South, that he in many ways reflected the views of the White South, which could be very racist at times. But on the other hand, he understood the plight of black Americans because he was from the South. As a man whose roots go deeply into southern soil,

I know how agonizing racial feelings are. I know how difficult it is to reshape the attitudes and the structure of our society. And I think what happened with LBJ is he was pushed. He was pushed by the civil rights movement. to sign bills like the Voting Rights Act. They would not have happened without a massive popular movement behind them.

And so the civil rights movement created the conditions in which someone like LBJ had no choice but to champion the voting rights act. And when LBJ did champion the Voting Rights Act, he did so quite eloquently. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves

the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And I think he did believe in this law, but it would not have happened without a tremendous amount of public pressure. or the tremendous amount of popular support and tremendous amount of outrage in America about the disenfranchisement that had occurred in the Jim Crow South. And so I think in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, that is, once again, what people are calling for is there needs to be a popular movement for voting rights in America to protect

the rights that the Supreme Court seems like it no longer will protect. No, I know at the time these laws were passed, they were far from universally accepted, right, particularly within conservative circles, Ronald Reagan oppose aspects of civil rights legislation, often framing them as federal overreach. And like, do you see those early objections around federal power, states' rights, and the role of government echoed in the kinds of arguments we're hearing today? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the arguments about the Voting Rights Act are newest that they didn't win at the time. They were overruled. There was a strong bipartisan consensus. for the Voting Rights Act. And to me, what changed was the Republican Party. The Republican Party moved from being a party that at least had a faction that was pro-civil rights to a party that has been taken over by people that are hostile to voting rights.

And when the leader of your party is Donald Trump, it's going to be very hard to imagine how you're sympathetic to something like the Voting Rights Act. And so I do think that this decision is a product of 40 or 50-year concerns. legal movement against the civil rights laws of the 1960s. And you can't understand it without understanding that this goes back many decades in terms of their opposition to the law. And they've basically been trying to get into a position where they find the right arguments, but also get hold of the right sources of power. And the biggest source of power was getting that kind of counter-revolutionary majority on the Supreme Court. In your book Minority Rule, you write

that by 2040, roughly 70% of Americans will live in just 15 states represented by only 30 senators. That means a shrinking, more rural, more conservative minority of the country could wield a disproportionate amount of political power. And just what kind of impact would something like that have, I mean, I guess on a body like the Senate, for example, but for American democracy more broadly, if you could just paint that picture for me. Well, in many ways, American democracy is not representative of the people. I mean, you have a president, Donald Trump, who initially was elected despite losing the popular vote. You have a Supreme Court in which presidents who lost the popular vote and were appointed a majority of Supreme Court justices. Those justices were then confirmed by senators who represented a minority of Americans. And so American democracy is not reflective of. of the popular will in many ways, and that crisis is ultimately getting worse as smaller, more rural, wider states have more impact and more representation in terms of our political

system. And that's why I'm concerned that the decision on the Voting Rights Act is going to make America even more unrepresentative than it already is. It's not like we're an ideal system to begin with. We already have a pretty broken democracy, and this is just going to break it even further. That feels like a good place for us to end. Ari, thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Plesson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.