In oral arguments before the Supreme Court today in Louisiana v. Callais, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest member of the Court, appointed by former President Joe Biden, drew a ridiculous comparison between Black voters being unable to form a majority-Black district and people with disabilities being unable to enter buildings before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Louisiana v. Callais was first argued in March and is challenging whether Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district, crosses the line into unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, which is illegal under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The ruling could reshape how states interpret and apply Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the next round of redistricting.
Democrats in South face wipeout if Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act — NYT pic.twitter.com/goHof93AS3
— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) October 15, 2025
Justice Jackson said:
A kind of paradigmatic example of this is 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 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.
Justice Jackson just compared black people not being able to create majority black congressional districts to disabled people not being able to enter a building before the ADA.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 15, 2025
"They don't have equal access to the voting system. They're disabled." pic.twitter.com/zvN8bJf4Xc
Her reasoning is flawed on multiple grounds, the most egregious of which is that the Voting Rights Act is meant to explicitly deal with intentional racial discrimination in voting, not unintentional, as the ADA does.
By equating racial representation with physical accessibility, Justice Jackson implies that political systems must be engineered to produce proportional results, regardless of intent or constitutional limits. If the Court embraces that logic, it would mark a departure from colorblind equal protection toward a vision of perpetual racial balancing, one that treats race not as a barrier to overcome, but as a basis for government design. Thankfully, with a conservative majority on the bench, we will not have to worry about logic like that of Justice Jackson, dictating constitutional questions.
