By admin 
This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court. The best way to support our work—and unlock exclusive legal analysis—is by joining Slate Plus. (If you are already a member, consider a donation or merch!)
Read more The Real Reason North Carolina’s GOP Is Proposing the Most Radical Anti-Abortion Bill Yet
In the month since the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act in ,our Constitution’s promise of multiracial democracy has come under concerted attack. Across much of the South, state legislatures have acted with lightning speed to enact new maps designed to strip communities of color of the ability to elect representatives of their choice, going to the extreme of rescheduling primary elections already in progress to wipe out Black representation. Callais not only permitted states to draw maps that entrench white control; it made up the rule that Congress has only limited power under the 15th Amendment to enforce the promise of racial equality at the polls. While scrapping the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement, Callais made it much harder to pass new federal voting-rights legislation to enforce the 15th Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting.
With Congress’ weakened ability to enforce the 15th Amendment, post-Callais fights over voting rights may depend on additional sources of federal voting-rights authority. Perhaps the most important of these is the Constitution’s guarantee clause, which provides that “the United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Though not well known and perennially underenforced, this clause provides an important hook for congressional action to safeguard an inclusive, multiracial democracy. It imposes a duty on the federal government to prevent states from sliding into oligarchy or other antidemocratic forms of government. In this way, it helps ensure what President Abraham Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
The guarantee clause has a long but often forgotten history linked to the pursuit of inclusive democracy. Black Americans who fought to make the United States into a multiracial democracy insisted that states that denied Black Americans full voting rights were not republican governments. For example, the Colored People’s Convention that met in 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, argued that equal voting rights were “inherent and essential to every republican form of government.” As one of the convention’s speakers observed, “A government based on the oligarchy of the skin is not republican in form.” Throughout Reconstruction, Black Americans fought for what the 1869 National Convention of Colored Men deemed a “cardinal idea” of republicanism: “The people shall have a voice as to who shall rule over them.” Without equal citizenship, equal voting rights, and equal opportunity to elect representatives of one’s choice, republican government was an impossibility.
Leading Republicans in Congress picked up on these ideas. In December 1865, introducing a petition signed by 280,000 Black Tennesseans that urged Congress to refuse to seat the state’s senators and representatives, Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner agreed with the Black petitioners that “a community which despoils two hundred and eighty thousand people of their rights cannot expect to be recognized as a republican government.” Several months later, in February 1866, during debates on an early version of the 14th Amendment, Sumner, a leading Radical Republican who had long championed racial equality, pressed Congress to use its authority under the guarantee clause to oust all-white rebel governments in the South and guarantee Black suffrage. Sumner asserted that “the true idea of a Republic” is that “all the citizens have an equal voice in government.” As the senator later put it, “A Government cannot be republican in form which sanctions inequality of rights.”
Read more Clarence Thomas Just Issued One of His Strangest Opinions Ever
Sumner’s position, initially dismissed as too radical, would become the centerpiece of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which dismantled all-white governments dominated by ex-Confederates and required Southern states to form new constitutions in which Black men would enjoy the right to vote. In one fell swoop, Congress used its guarantee clause authority to establish multiracial democracy where human bondage had previously held sway, enfranchising huge numbers of formerly enslaved Black Americans and remaking Southern society. Going forward, it was hoped that Southern governments would truly rest on the consent of the governed, as the Declaration of Independence had promised. Sumner called the guarantee clause “a sleeping giant in the Constitution, never until this war awakened,” that “now comes forward with a giant’s power.”
As states seek to slash Black representation and make it impossible for communities of color to elect representatives of their choice, Congress can invoke the guarantee clause as a hook for voting-rights legislation, building off this history. Indeed, there are notable advantages in invoking the clause as a reaction to Callais. When Congress acts under the guarantee clause, it can regulate state and local elections, rendering it an important supplement to the power to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections contained in the Constitution’s elections clause. As Reconstruction shows, the guarantee clause gives Congress a powerful weapon to address recalcitrant states that flout the promise of what one Reconstruction legislator called “government by the people; not by a portion of the people, but all the people.”
Even more importantly, the Supreme Court has perennially treated questions arising under the guarantee clause as political in character and not fit for judicial resolution. Going all the way back to the court’s 1849 decision in Luther v. Borden, it has long stressed that congressional action under this clause “could not be questioned in a judicial tribunal.” Because guarantee clause claims cannot be heard in court, there is no body of precedent that can be used to attack voting-rights legislation enacted under it. Consequently, the clause confers on Congress especially broad authority over state electoral systems and makes judicial second-guessing of legislation designed to ensure equal representation for all particularly improper. Given all the ways the current court has weaponized the Constitution to destroy the Voting Rights Act, this long-settled understanding of the guarantee clause makes it a critically important tool to respond to Callais.
In short, the guarantee clause can help redress the ways a toxic and supercharged form of gerrymandering—greenlit by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority in Callais—is destroying our Constitution’s promise of multiracial democracy. In this moment, when the court has turned its back on the Constitution’s bedrock promises, Congress has both the power and the responsibility to prevent our nation from becoming “a government based on the oligarchy of the skin.” Even after Callais, it retains the power, under the guarantee clause, to stamp out state efforts to decimate Black representation, manipulate electoral outcomes, and leave communities of color without an equal voice in government.
Read more Graham Platner’s Team Keeps Insulting Our Intelligence