Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stirred up quite the constitutional cocktail on Wednesday, raising eyebrows and igniting backlash after she invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) during a heated round of oral arguments. The case at hand, Louisiana v. Callais, involves whether states are required to factor in race when redrawing congressional districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Jackson, who was riffing off a line of questioning by fellow liberal Justice Elena Kagan, argued that the government’s obligation to address racial disparities in voting access shouldn’t hinge on proving discriminatory intent. Her chosen example? The ADA — a law about physical access for people with disabilities.
“Going back to this discriminatory intent point — and the fact that remedial action, absent discriminatory intent, is really not a new idea in civil rights laws,” Jackson stated. “And my paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA.”
According to Jackson, the ADA was passed to make public spaces more accessible to people with disabilities, regardless of whether building owners meant to exclude them. “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,” she claimed.
Then came the line that set social media ablaze: in defending the race-based remedies under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Jackson concluded, “They’re disabled,” referring to minority voters under the law — rhetorically, perhaps, but enough to launch a thousand tweets.
To her credit (or perhaps detriment), Jackson leaned into the analogy. The idea, she said, was that these voters suffer the effects of “past and present decisions that disadvantaged minorities” and therefore require the federal government to intervene — much like the ADA compels buildings to be accessible to those with physical disabilities.
But Louisiana’s attorney wasn’t having it. He pointed out that ADA remedies are not based on racial classifications or stereotypes. “It’s not race-based,” Jackson agreed, but then doubled down: “But what you’re saying, then, that if the problem of no access is about race, ‘it’s just too bad,’ because you can’t have a remedy that relates to race?”
“Absolutely not, Your Honor,” came the reply — a line that, notably, Jackson did not rebut.
Critics online immediately latched onto her comments, accusing her of equating minority voters with disabled individuals — a comparison many saw as not only insulting but dangerously reductive. Her defenders, however, pointed out that this analogy wasn’t new; Jackson herself cited the Court’s own language in Allen v. Milligan (2021), another racial redistricting case, where the justices referred to voting processes as being “not equally open” — language she claimed implied a form of “disability.”
But for conservatives watching this argument unfold, Jackson’s logic seemed to blur lines that should remain distinct: structural accessibility for those with physical disabilities versus race-based redistricting mandates that can upend equal treatment under the law.
As usual, the left cloaks race-preferential policies in the language of fairness and equity, even if it requires shoehorning in analogies that liken the experience of Black voters in 2025 to wheelchair users facing a flight of stairs. That’s not legal reasoning — that’s ideological activism dressed up in a black robe.
While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears ready to narrow the scope of Section 2, the real question is how far they’ll go in reining in a law that’s increasingly being used not to ensure equal access — but equal outcomes, often along strictly racial lines.
If Justice Jackson’s ADA comparison is the best legal rationale the left has left, it’s no wonder the Voting Rights Act is getting a much-needed constitutional check.
