Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Likens Black Voters To Disabled Americans: “They Don’t Have Equal Access”
Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at a Supreme Court hearing on whether Louisiana congressional districts are racially gerrymandered.
SUPREME COURT ASSOCIATE JUSTICE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: I guess I’m thinking of it, of the fact that remedial action, absent discriminatory intent, is really not a new idea in the civil rights laws. And my kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA. Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities. And so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings. And it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building or the person who owned the building intended for them to be exclusionary. That’s irrelevant. Congress said the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities if readily possible. I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. The idea in Section 2 is that we are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system. They’re disabled. In fact, we use the word disabled in Milligan. We say that’s a way in which you see that these processes are not equally open.
