Deals a Death Blow

Supreme Court Deals a Death Blow to the Voting Rights Act

The “now-completed demolition” of the law could take us back to the Jim Crow era.

Ari Berman

The Supreme Court’s six-to-three Republican-appointed majority issued a staggering ruling on Wednesday essentially killing the remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act, dealing a death blow to the country’s most important civil rights law. The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Louisiana v. Callais strikes down the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana and in so doing narrows Section 2 of the VRA to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.

“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.”

Alito’s opinion essentially overrules the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, finding that there must be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to show that district lines discriminate against voters of color, which is extremely difficult to prove. He also adds a series of new tests to the law that will similarly make it nearly impossible for states to draw majority-minority districts. As University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald pointed out, “my quick read of Callais decision is that the majority says if a racial community votes consistently with a party, then it is okay to deny them representation because that’s just partisan gerrymandering.”

Justice Elena Kagan forcefully dissented. “I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote,” she wrote. “I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

The decision will be devastating for communities of color and the candidates they support.

She added: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks… But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.”

The decision crippling Section 2 of the VRA, which required that racial minorities have an equal opportunity to meaningfully participate in the electoral process, will be devastating for communities of color and the Democratic candidates they usually support. The only silver lining for those harmed may be that the ruling came be too late to have a major impact on the 2026 midterm elections. Candidate filing deadlines have passed in most Southern states; primary elections have been held already in North Carolina, Texas, and Mississippi; and Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia have mailed ballots for upcoming May primaries. Nonetheless, the watchdog group Issue One estimates that the ruling could still shift two to four seats to the GOP before the midterms, “concentrated in Florida and neighboring Southern states.”

In the long run, however, the court’s decision will turbocharge the GOP’s current gerrymandering efforts for future elections in 2027 and 2028, potentially costing Democrats up to 19 House seats, according to one study. As much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats, according to a report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund. Nearly 200 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the South could also be wiped out. 

Republicans could ultimately eliminate a dozen Democratic congressional seats in the South as a result, leaving no Democratic representatives or majority-minority districts in states including Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana—the very places where voting discrimination has historically been most prevalent. That will take America back to the Jim Crow era, with no Black representatives in Southern states with sizable Black populations. It will be reminiscent of what happened after Reconstruction was violently overthrown, when white supremacy and one-party rule were locked in for decades across the South. Indeed, the Callais decision is likely to trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction.

The hypocrisy of the Roberts Court is simply astounding. The GOP-appointed wing of the court is clearly inventing one set of rules to approve maps that favor white voters and Republicans while using another set of rules to block maps that benefit racial minorities and Democrats.

In December, the Court allowed a mid-decade redistricting plan in Texas that was designed to give Republicans five more seats on Trump’s orders to go into effect despite a lower court, with the majority opinion written by a Trump appointee, finding that there was overwhelming evidence of the use of race to draw district lines and disempower people based on the color of their skin. In Callais, by contrast, the court held that race could not be a factor in drawing district lines because it violated the 14th and 15th Amendments. But they allowed Republicans in Texas to do just that just months ago.

An exasperated Sonia Sotomayor summed up the double standard during oral arguments in October. “What you’re saying to us [is]…‘You can use [race] to help yourself achieve goals that reduce particular groups’ electoral participation, but you can’t use it to remedy that situation,’” she said.

The Roberts Court concocted a doctrine of​​ giving legislatures accused of racial gerrymandering the “presumption of legislative good faith” in order to allow Texas and other GOP-controlled states to get away with discriminating against voters of color. But the Court’s majority has made it clear that such good faith only goes in one direction; they’ll agree to let racial gerrymandering stand when it suits GOP interests and benefits white lawmakers, but strike down any map in which legislatures try to ensure fair representation for minority groups.

Up to 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus members could lose their seats.

The Court’s bias is also evident in its timing. The Texas map wasn’t enacted until the end of August and the district court ruling blocking it was issued in November, a full year before the 2026 election. Nonetheless, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a concurring opinion that the lower court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” But in the Louisiana case, the Court has issued a sweeping ruling relatively late in an election year, when maps are already in place around the country, that has the potential to upend district lines across the South—the very thing the justices have told lower courts not to do.

The Callais ruling is even more stunning because the Louisiana map at issue in this case followed a very recent precedent set by the Court. In a rare victory for voting rights, the Court ruled in June 2023 that Alabama violated Section 2 of the VRA by failing to draw a second majority-Black district in a state whose population is more than a quarter Black. That led federal courts to order Louisiana, which has a larger Black population than Alabama, to draw a second majority-Black district as well. Despite the near-identical nature of the Alabama and Louisiana cases, the Supreme Court quickly turned its back on the VRA after white voters claimed that an increase in Black representation was an affront to their “personal dignity.”

In truth, the Callais opinion is the latest in a long line of cases attacking the VRA–which has been an obsession for Chief Justice John Roberts for more than four decades. “Today’s ruling is part of a set: For over a decade, this Court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act,” Kagan wrote.

In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, Roberts ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. While he argued that “things [had] changed dramatically” since 1965, the ruling, not surprisingly, led to a proliferation of new voter suppression laws, with at least 31 states passing 115 restrictive voting measures over the ensuing years, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 

Roberts performed a bait-and-switch in Shelby County, claiming that it “in no way affect[ed] the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in Section 2” of the VRA, which prohibits voting changes that discriminate against voters of color. But the Roberts Court has been steadily chipping away at that remaining part of the VRA too, limiting the ability to challenge laws that target minority voters in the 2021 Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee case and now gutting Section 2’s prohibitions on racial gerrymandering.

That same bait-and-switch applies to the Court’s redistricting jurisprudence. In the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Roberts wrote for the majority that federal courts could not review, let alone strike down, claims of partisan gerrymandering, asserting they were “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” He claimed in Rucho that federal courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting” but the Supreme Court has now made that nearly impossible to do as well.

Rolling back the civil rights revolution of the 1960s represents the culmination of Roberts’ legal career. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, he worked strenuously to weaken the VRA, claiming it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that fight when Congress voted overwhelmingly to strengthen and reauthorize the law in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, presiding over a series of cases that have crippled the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. In the early 1980s, Roberts wanted to find that violations of the VRA only applied to cases of intentional discrimination. Congress overruled him then, but now the Court has brought back that intentional discrimination standard in Callais.

“The Voting Rights Act is not a relic,” Louisiana’s two Black members of Congress, Reps. Troy Carter and Cleo Fields, wrote in The New York Times last October. “It is a living promise to all Americans that our democracy belongs to everyone. For nearly 200 years, Black Americans had virtually no representation in our collective governance. Section 2 was enacted to right that wrong. It remains as vital today as it was when it was first signed into law 60 years ago.”

Like so many decisions by the Roberts Court, the Callais ruling will boost Republican efforts to distort the political system in their favor, throwing a late lifeline to Trump’s efforts to rig the midterms after the gerrymandering arms race he started has suffered numerous setbacks in recent months. It comes at a particularly perilous time for American democracy, with Trump threatening to “nationalize the voting” and his administration taking unprecedented steps to interfere in the midterms, from seizing ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, to demanding sensitive voter roll information from all 50 states, to aggressively supporting new voter suppression measures.

But today’s decision is much bigger than just partisan politics. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made America a multiracial democracy. It ended an authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow South that prevented millions of people from enjoying the fundamental promise of equal citizenship under the law. With an authoritarian president now in the White House and the Voting Rights Act a dead letter, America may become a democracy in name only once again. 

“The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—’one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history,'” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”