Amir Badat discusses SCOTUS ruling and reaction

Added: 2026-04-30

[00:00:00]Amir, we know you're chatting with Sherrilyn Ifill earlier. It's good to have you back chatting with me here as well. You heard from the Senator the United States Senator Raphael Warnock, also heard from State Senator Greg Dolezal there. What's Fair Fight's position on all of this?

[00:00:14]I think it's really important for us to highlight what Senator Warnock just talked about in the context of the Voting Rights Act in Section 2 in particular. You know, the Voting Rights Act, like Senator Warnock mentioned, is the crown jewel of legislation from the Civil Rights era, and it is literally what pulled this country out of Jim Crow.

[00:00:35]And we have to remember that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was amended in 1982 by a bipartisan Congress, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, and that is the provision that protected against racial discrimination in the context of redistricting, and that's the provision that the Supreme Court took aim at and gutted in this decision. Uh with Cale, and so what Senator Warnock talked about, the the historical context of the Voting Rights Act, is incredibly important, and also the impact that this gutting is going to have. It has already, we've seen just from what uh Greg Dolezal said just now in the clip that you aired, that Republicans are running and uh trying to redistrict as quickly as possible in the South. We've seen Republicans in Alabama call for a special session. There is a special session coming up in Mississippi in 3 weeks to redistrict, and so uh this decision has opened the floodgates to discriminatory redistricting, and we need to be fighting back. I want to read you something that was uh just released by the chairman of the Republican Party of Georgia. This is from Josh McKoon as part of a multi-paragraph statement. He wrote this saying, quote, "We applaud the justices for rejecting the race-based mandates that forced states like Georgia to prioritize racial gerrymandering over compact districts that respect communities of interest, traditional boundaries, and the principle of color-blind justice enshrined in our Constitution."

[00:02:09]To those who would raise that concern and argue that this majority ruling from the Supreme Court is a push towards more, as the chairman of the Republican Party put it here in Georgia, color-blind justice, is that what the Supreme Court is doing in your view, or are they doing something else?

[00:02:29]Absolutely not. What they're doing here is that they're making it easier to discriminate on the basis of race. What Section 2 did was it created a tool for courts to identify where racial discrimination is happening based on how lines are drawn. And what the Supreme Court has done with this decision is it has eviscerated that tool. And so now, under Section 2, the new standard announced by the Supreme Court, states, counties, cities can engage in redistricting that will weaken or dilute minority voting power, and in places like Georgia, that means black voting power in a significant way, and they will face no liability. And that is what's happening here is that this is opening the floodgates to discrimination, and when we hear the words color-blind, I think that should immediately send up red flags because this is not allowing color-blind uh redistricting. This is allowing redistricting that will discriminate against minority voters.

[00:03:38]All right, Amir Badat with Fair Fight Action. Thank you for your time and for your perspective and being a part of the many different perspectives we are going to be hearing from throughout the day and in the coming days and weeks. This is a conversation that is certainly going to continue. Amir, thank you very much.

[00:03:55]Thank you so much.