'Mysterious order' could give Clarence Thomas an excuse to undo voting rights

U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has long telegraphed his desire to gut crucial portions of the Voting Rights Act, and he might finally get a chance to undermine protections ensuring equal rights for Black and Hispanic voters.

Thomas first laid out his objections to those protections in 1994, when only the late Antonin Scalia signaled a willingness to go along with him, but president Donald Trump has since packed the court with fellow right-wing ideologues, and a new case could give him a pretext to achieve his longtime goal, reported CNN.

"Now, a mysterious order from the high court in a Louisiana redistricting case suggests it is seriously reconsidering the scope of VRA safeguards against congressional and state legislative district maps that dilute minority votes," the network reported. "The looming battle comes as some states, notably Alabama, are resisting court orders to remedy discrimination, and President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is abandoning the federal government’s usual role in protecting minority voting rights."

The court will reconsider a case in October involving a U.S. district court ruling on Louisiana's congressional map that created two Black majority districts but protected the state's favored incumbents, including House speaker Mike Johnson, and Thomas wrote a six-page dissenting statement after justices heard arguments on June 27 but were unable to reach an agreement.

“I am hopeful that this Court will soon realize that the conflict its Section 2 jurisprudence has sown with the Constitution is too severe to ignore,” Thomas wrote.

No other justices signed on to his dissent, but justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett have all signaled support for his views – once deemed "radical" by his colleagues – on a "race neutral" approach to voting rights, and chief justice John Roberts and justice Brett Kavanaugh have also appeared willing to strike down those protections.

"During March oral arguments in the Louisiana case, Roberts was skeptical of the state’s new map with two Black-majority districts, which were created after a lower court found the original map with a single Black-majority district likely violated Section 2. Roberts questioned whether one of the new districts was sufficiently 'compact' to meet standards; he called it 'a snake that runs from one end of the state to the other,'" CNN reported.

Gorsuch agreed and even went further, saying that any consideration of race in redrawing a discriminatory map would violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, and Kavanaugh questioned the authority of states to do so.