[D]ue to our Janus-like election-law jurisprudence, States do not know how to draw maps that “survive both constitutional and V[oting] R[ights] A[ct] review.”
—Justice Clarence ThomasREF
No words in the Constitution were purchased with the staggering amount of blood and treasure as the Civil War Amendments were…. All three…were a rainbow after the storm, but particularly so the Fifteenth Amendment. It contained the simple elegant promise that the right to vote, to allocate power, could never be allocated again using the wicked tool of race…. Efforts to realize the dream of the Civil War Amendments saw moments of hope, such as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, collapse into race based legislative line drawing of the sort challenged here.
—Public Interest Legal FoundationREF
