Former Attorney General Eric Holder will assail the Supreme Court in a speech Saturday as the high court prepares to weigh in on a number of key redistricting cases that could dramatically reshape the balance of power in Congress.
Holder, who spent six years heading up the Department of Justice during the Obama administration, now serves as chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The high court, he will say in a keynote address at the annual Minnesota Association of Black Lawyers Foundation Gala, has issued rulings based not on “neutral jurisprudence,” but on “outcome-driven ideology.”
“We have watched as campaign finance safeguards were dismantled and anti-corruption laws cast aside,” Holder will say in prepared remarks obtained exclusively by POLITICO ahead of his speech. “We have seen the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and the Court’s refusal to restrain abusive partisan gerrymandering. Now, even what remains of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, is hanging by a thread – threatened in ways that could legalize racial gerrymandering and shift the partisan makeup of as many as nineteen congressional seats through judicial fiat.”
The court has found itself at the center of a national debate over the limits of redistricting since the 2020 census. Louisiana in August asked the court to ban the use of race in redistricting that has been seen as central to increasing the representation of Black, Latino and other minority voters in federal, state and local government. The court is expected to issue a decision by June 2026, one that could wipe out majority-minority districts.
“It’s the issue of race that exposes perhaps the deepest hypocrisy and most shocking incoherence,” he is expected to say. “After all, the very same Court that has barred even indirect consideration of race in college admissions … then endorsed the use of race and racial profiling in violent ICE raids, detentions, and deportations without due process.”
Another decision in the hands of the Supreme Court could have a more immediate effect on the political map, following a lower court ruling that struck down a new Republican-friendly congressional map in Texas as a likely racial gerrymander. With just weeks to go before the impending filing deadline, the Supreme Court has almost no time to decide whether to restore the GOP-led redraw.
Republicans hope the lack of time will play to their advantage. Already, Justice Samuel Alito has allowed the state to temporarily reinstate its new districts while the justices make their final decision.
Holder will lambast the court for what he says is an incoherent application of color-blindness in its recent rulings.
“The consequences are profound,” Holder will say. “The practical impact of such rulings is to weaken democracy and embolden would-be authoritarians, concentrating power in the hands of corporations and billionaires while stripping essential protections from voters, workers, consumers, communities, and the environment.”
Andrew Howard contributed to this report.
