This week, President Biden suggested a few changes to the Supreme Court. Those changes include, but are not limited to a code of ethics as well as term limits for justices. When dealing with the Supreme Court it is important to understand that any changes to the Supreme Court have some impact on Black people. Over the last couple of years, some of their decisions have negatively impacted affirmative action, women’s rights, and voting rights. In light of these sorts of decisions, and the idea that Supreme Court Justices have lifetime appointments, adding term limits would change the perception of the Court.
You may be wondering what exactly some of the decisions the current Court has made. With election season around the corner and the chance that the next president will choose at least one Judge, let’s look at some of the decisions that had and will continue to have an impact on Black voters for some time to come. Let’s start with affirmative action.
Last year, a decision was made that race-based admission was unconstitutional. The case was Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The question that the Court had to answer was if race could be used as a factor for admitting a student into college. The Court decided that race couldn’t be used. The aftereffect of this decision was that affirmative action programs across the country started to be removed. Of course, affirmative action programs were created to ensure that qualified Black students were given equal opportunities to be admitted. They were also created in order to ensure diverse student bodies. The Supreme Court decision concluded that affirmative action programs didn’t have focus and measurable objectives that would warrant using race.
The next decision that had an even more explicit impact on Black voters was the Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP case in 2023. The question was if the South Carolina redistricting map, which moved thousands of Black voters to a different district, constituted racial gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the act of manipulating district boundaries to give an advantage to one party or another. In this case, some boundaries were moved that included hundreds of thousands of Black residents. In a state that had a fourth of its residents as Black, the restructuring of the districts meant that they would only be able to vote for one of the seven representatives in Congress. The Court decided that the redistricting of the map and its effect on Black voters was circumstantial and race wasn’t a basis for the map being redrawn.
The last decision that the Court made that negatively impacted women’s rights. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the question was whether Mississippi’s law banning nearly all abortions after 15 weeks was unconstitutional. The Court decided that the Constitution does not give a right to abortion. Among a bunch of reasons, they said that since abortion isn’t mentioned in the constitution, it can’t be a constitutional right. This decision overruled Roe v. Wade which decided that women had a right to abortions.
Speaking of the Constitution, let’s circle back to President Biden’s proposal for term limits. If this was to be done, how could it be done? Some scholars suggest that Congress could impose the limits by passing legislation. They argue that since the Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention term limits but just speaks about “good behavior” then Congress can simply add limits by law. The other side of the coin is that “good behavior” implies that they have lifetime terms. If that’s the implication, then Congress can’t change it. Term limits would need to be made via an amendment to the Constitution.
As we enter a contentious last few months of the year, there will be a lot of chatter about the Supreme Court. There will also be a lot of chatter about the Black voter. As issues come up, they will be addressed here. Law and culture are intertwined, and the political season has a lot of ramifications for Black culture as a whole.