Today, the Supreme Court took aim at two of our bedrock rights enshrined in the Constitution during Reconstruction: the Fourteenth Amendment, which defines U.S. citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which recognized that Black people had equivalent voting power to White people.
In Trump v. Casa, Inc., the Court cleared the way for Donald Trump to enforce his executive order directing his administration not to recognize the citizenship of certain people born to immigrant parents in this country. It took this step despite the explicit language in the Fourteenth Amendment stating that, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” While the Supreme Court’s decision did not rule on the ultimate legality of Trump’s birthright citizenship order, the fact that the majority of the justices were willing to allow this order to go into effect shows just how tenuous our basic rights have become.
Separately, the Supreme Court took another ominous step. After the 2020 census, Louisiana redrew its congressional districts and removed one of the two majority-Black districts it had previously had. Lower courts ruled that this action violated the Voting Rights Act and forced Louisiana to redraw its lines. After doing so, White people challenged the new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Court was supposed to rule today on whether the new map was constitutional. Rather than decide the case, they asked the lawyers to re-argue the case in the fall.
The justices didn’t give a reason why they took this unusual step. However, during the oral argument and in the past few years, Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have made the argument that the Voting Rights Act is incompatible with equality principles embedded in the Constitution because it requires states to draw majority-minority districts in certain circumstances.
The Republican appointees on the Supreme Court previously struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited states with a history of suppressing Black and other people of color’s votes from creating further voter suppression and required the federal government to pre-clear any voting law changes they attempted to enact to make sure they didn’t do so. Therefore, the threat to the remainder of the Voting Rights Act here is very real.
Today’s dual attack on citizenship and voting rights should not come as a shock. The Reconstruction-era amendments—the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery and guaranteed that all people would have the right to the fruits of their own labor, the Fourteenth Amendment that defined U.S. citizenship and enshrined the right to due process and formal legal equality, and the Fifteenth Amendment, that gave Black people the right to vote on equal terms with White people—are very much intertwined. In fact, as historian Eric Foner has pointed out, the Reconstruction-era Congress that passed these amendments came to realize that each of these rights was necessary to create the multiracial democracy they had envisioned.
Today, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the end of Reconstruction and the subsequent terrorism in Southern states that ended the multiracial democratic experiment, the Supreme Court’s actions show just how fragile these rights are and how easily they can be taken away if we do not fight back.
Jobs with Justice plans to do more than decry the rigged system that can take away people’s citizenship and voting rights. We plan to join with allies and create the framework for a new Reconstruction, one that builds on each of the Reconstruction amendments—the right of each person to freedom and the fruits of their labor, the right to citizenship, equality, and due process, and the right to vote—to create the multiracial democracy that was promised by Reconstruction.
