Morelle Statement on Future of VRA as SCOTUS Hears Arguments in Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais

WASHINGTON – Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25), the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, issued the following statement as the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments in Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, cases that have the potential to profoundly undermine the vital protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA):

“The VRA has been the most impactful civil rights legislation to ever grace this nation. With astounding success, the VRA has served as a bulwark against racial discrimination in voting for 60 years. Americans took pride that both Republicans and Democrats unequivocally believed every citizen, regardless of race, had a right to free and equal access to the ballot. Tragically, preventing racial discrimination in voting has become a partisan issue. Conservatives on the Supreme Court, like Republicans in Congress, appear ready to abandon their once-firm commitment to the VRA, allowing states to silence Black, Latino, Native, and Asian American voices across this country. The Supreme Court should take heed—a nation cannot claim ‘equal justice under law’ when it bars its own citizens from voting.

“The history of the United States has been a prolonged and righteous crusade ‘to form a more perfect Union.’ Americans have spent 250 years forging a democracy that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. A young United States began its trek toward democracy in the early days of our Republic as men without property first attained the franchise. Later, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, reaped through the great and terrible cost of the Civil War and championed by Rochester’s Frederick Douglass, promised a society where every American, regardless of race, could elect candidates of their choice—a promise soon betrayed by discriminatory Jim Crow laws across the South. In the early Twentieth Century, after decades of persistence, suffragists secured voting rights for the women of America. And finally, civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s, including my late friend Congressman John Lewis, marched with moral stamina and courage to demand the enactment of the VRA and to at last deliver a full, free, and fair democracy to every state in the Union. This much is clear—the United States was not a fully functioning democracy prior to 1965, and it will cease to be one should the Supreme Court further demolish the urgent and necessary protections of the VRA. The Supreme Court can either nobly save, or meanly lose, this last best hope of earth. I pray it does the former.”

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The Committee on House Administration’s jurisdiction includes federal elections, House operations, Capitol Complex security, Smithsonian Institution, and Legislative Branch agencies such as the Library of Congress, and Government Publishing Office.