(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday made an odd analogy between black voters and disabled Americans to argue in favor of creating majority-black congressional districts.
Jackson, a Biden appointee, made the comparison during oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a case over the constitutionality of court-ordered, black-majority districts in the Pelican State.
Leftists support the districts, while conservatives argue that race should not be a determining factor in redistricting. To make what she called “a pragmatic example,” Jackson invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to defend race-conscious mapmaking.
“My kind of pragmatic example of this is something like the ADA,” Jackson claimed. “Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities.”
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.
"They don't have equal access to the voting system. They're disabled." pic.twitter.com/zvN8bJf4Xc
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 15, 2025
She continued, “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.”
Jackson argued that the same rationale should be applied to race and redistricting, as she claimed unequal outcomes warrant government intervention.
“The idea in Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act of 1965] 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,” she said. “Right? They’re disabled. In fact, we use the word ‘disabled’ in Milligan.”
She went on to question why intent should matter in determining whether a system is discriminatory.
“I don’t understand why it matters whether or not the state intended to do that?” Jackson asked. “What Congress is saying is if it is happening — which Section 2 gives us the tools to determine — you’ve got to fix it. The difference is that the remedy under the ADA and other anti-discrimination laws is not stereotyping. We don’t, then it’s not race-based.”
Jackson’s analogy appeared at odds with the Court’s conservative majority, which signaled a willingness to further limit the use of race in redistricting.
