In 2023, the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia held that Georgia’s 2021 congressional and legislative maps diluted the voting strength of Black voters and therefore violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. On appeal, the Secretary of State of Georgia argues that the district court’s application of Section 2 to the 2021 maps was unconstitutional because, in his view, Section 2 is no longer necessary to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment in Georgia. CAC filed an amicus brief at the Eleventh Circuit explaining that the Secretary’s arguments cannot be squared with the text and history of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.  Our brief makes three main points.

First, the Fifteenth Amendment gives Congress sweeping power to enforce the Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting. The Fifteenth Amendment provides that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” To make the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee a reality, the Framers explicitly invested Congress with the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” By adding this language to the Amendment, the Framers gave Congress sweeping authority to stamp out every conceivable attempt by states to deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race.

Second, Congress constitutionally used its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement power to enact Section 2’s prohibition of vote dilution. After the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, gerrymanders were the paradigm of the dilution strategy in the South. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to rid the country of racial discrimination in voting. In 1982, Congress amended Section 2 of the VRA to clarify that electoral practices that produce discriminatory results—including diluting the voting strength of communities of color through redistricting—are prohibited, even in the absence of discriminatory intent. For decades, courts have applied Section 2 to districting maps using the framework the Supreme Court established in Thornburg v. Gingles. Section 2 and Gingles are well within Congress’s congressional authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed just last year in Allen v. Milligan.

Finally, Section 2’s application to present circumstances does not exceed Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment power to prohibit redistricting maps that dilute Black voters’ electoral strength. The Secretary argues that Congress exceeded its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement power because Congress last amended Section 2 in 1982 and, in his view, Section 2 is no longer necessary today. He is wrong. The Secretary’s argument is irreconcilable with the text and history of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment granted Congress, not courts, broad power to ban racial discrimination in voting, and courts cannot impose an expiration date on the legislation Congress decided was appropriate. Additionally, the Secretary’s insistence that Congress must continually justify the existence of statutes passed under the Fifteenth Amendment has no footing in Eleventh Circuit or Supreme Court precedent.

As the Eleventh Circuit explained in 1984, “it is a small thing and not a great intrusion into state autonomy to require the states to live up to their obligation to avoid discriminatory practices in the election process.” This is no less true today.