He’s 'a coward': Legal expert demolishes Alito in damning take-down

Professor of Law Richard Hasen, an elections law expert, is denouncing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito as a “coward” who is either lying to himself or the American public, after authoring what has been called the “earthquake” decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply erodes the Voting Rights Act.

Alito’s “disastrous” majority opinion in Callais “essentially gutted what remains of the Voting Rights Act,” but he “claims to have done no such thing. The question is why,” Hasen posits.

Hasen charges that Justice Alito was too “afraid” to share his actual opinion, and so he found ways to “get away with overturning Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act through technical minutiae rather than through a direct hit.”

Section 2, passed in 1965, is the provision of the Voting Rights Act that protects minority voters from discriminatory voting laws and maps.

Hasen argues that Alito’s opinions in both Callais and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee “necessarily imply” that “Congress cannot do anything to protect minority voting rights short of banning intentional discrimination despite the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, despite the 15th Amendment’s ban on race discrimination in voting, and despite the fact that both amendments explicitly give Congress the power to enforce the measures by ‘appropriate legislation.'”

He notes that Alito managed to render Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “essentially toothless,” while leaving the six-decade-old landmark law on the books.

“Since Brnovich,” he writes, “no plaintiffs have brought successful suits under Section 2 challenging a law alleged to suppress votes.”

Indeed, Alito’s opinions in both cases are “extreme overkill,” handing states “multiple pathways” to defeat a Section 2 claim.

Hasen explains that for Alito, “to discriminate against Louisiana Democrats is not to discriminate against Louisiana’s Black voters, despite the overwhelming overlap between the two groups.”

But for Hasen, the most “galling” issue is that Alito “goes out of his way to disclaim he is making radical change while putting multiple stakes through the heart of Section 2.”

He offers some possibilities of why Alito has acted in this way.

“Maybe Alito is worried that a ruling forthrightly saying what he is doing would sully the reputation of the court, which has already faced public criticism for killing off another key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby County decision,” Hasen writes. “Perhaps he is worried that a frontal kill of Section 2 would energize Democrats, leading to greater losses for Republicans in the midterm elections and in future elections.”

Regardless, Hasen concludes, no one “is fooled by Justice Alito’s act of cowardice, unless it is Justice Alito himself. If that’s the case, he is more deluded than he seems to think the rest of us are.”