At oral arguments in Louisiana v Callais on Wednesday, the US supreme court appeared ready to strike down section 2, effectively completing the gradual nullification of the Voting Rights Act that it has pursued for over a decade.
If they do, it will mark the end of the Voting Rights Act, widely considered the crowning achievement of the civil right movement, which the supreme court, under John Roberts, has been dismantling for years.
It is apparently through this fanciful and motivated reasoning that Roberts and his colleagues have decided that any move to secure Black Americans’ voting rights and equality in fact violates the very constitutional amendments that were meant to secure their voting rights and equality.
The Voting Rights Act does not violate the 15th amendment; it enforces it, and gave the United States, during the 60 years or so of its enactment, its only plausible claim to being a real democracy.
But bad faith, increasingly, is what the supreme court operates under.
It looks like the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s final provision, section 2, which gives the federal government the authority to shield voters from racial gerrymandering intended to weaken Black political power, is about to expire. During the oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday, the US Supreme Court seemed prepared to invalidate section 2, thereby concluding the progressive repeal of the Voting Rights Act that it has been pursuing for more than ten years.
The lawsuit is based on new congressional districting maps created in Louisiana following the 2020 census, which revealed that the state was eligible for six House of Representatives seats and that roughly one-third of its citizens were Black. Voters filed a lawsuit against the state after it rejected seven more racially fair maps and only included one majority-Black congressional district. Federal courts then ordered Louisiana to comply with the Voting Rights Act by creating new maps that would reflect the state’s population share and provide Black Louisianans with an equal chance to elect representatives of their choosing.
However, “non-African-American voters” have filed a lawsuit to have those racially proportionate maps removed, claiming that the VRA’s implementation infringes on their rights under the 14th and 15th amendments. They contend that racial discrimination against non-Black (i.e., white) people is actually reflected in the maps created to address racial discrimination against Black people. It appears that the court will rule in their favor.
Should this occur, the Voting Rights Act—generally regarded as the pinnacle of the civil rights movement—will come to an end. The Supreme Court, led by John Roberts, has been tearing it down for years. Section 5 required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal preclearance for changes to their voting laws. The court invalidated much of this requirement in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case.
In later cases, the court has frequently strengthened states’ authority to enact voting laws that were previously thought to be discriminatory and limited the circumstances in which litigants may file claims pertaining to voting rights. Chief Justice Roberts argued in Shelby’s majority opinion that racial inequality and hostility had subsided to the point where such a regime was unnecessary and in fact infringed on states’ rights. The disparity between Black and white voter turnout rates increased significantly as states implemented numerous new voting restrictions in the wake of the incident. Districts previously under the section 5 preclearance regime saw a twofold increase in its reach.
On Wednesday, the court seemed determined to apply the same logic that it used in Shelby county to section 2, demanding that Janai Nelson, the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, justify why section 2 should still be efficacious and should not be considered to have somehow expired. Justices Kavanaugh and Alito argued that the racial gerrymander was acceptable if it was meant to be a partisan gerrymander, meaning that the intended partisanship of the lawmakers—rather than the gerrymander’s racially discriminatory effects—was what mattered.
The Republicans on the court, along with those representing the litigants, did not appear to believe that this should matter during oral argument. Prior Supreme Court precedent and a wealth of evidence from the congressional record have stated that discriminatory impact, rather than intent, is sufficient to constitute illegal racial discrimination. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s voice was worn out as she refuted these claims while pretending to be posing questions from the bench. Jackson, the court’s most ardent and persuasive supporter of the Reconstruction amendments and the legacy of the civil rights movement, sputtered that the remedies “are so tied up with race, because race is the initial problem!” However, it appeared that she was aware that her peers were not paying attention.
The Roberts court’s stance against minorities’ racial justice claims and its readiness to reverse civil rights legislation and the Reconstruction amendments in order to produce interpretations that serve to uphold rather than challenge historical racial and gender hierarchies are two key trends that are reflected in this case. The attorney general of Louisiana, who has taken a different stance in the case since it was first argued last year and joined an opposition to the Voting Rights Act, asserted that it would be unconstitutional to impose a racial stereotype by assuming that Black voters would vote differently from white voters, who predominate in Louisiana. This flimsy fiction made Justice Kagan frustrated.
The attorney general, however, was aware of his audience. Roberts has long opposed efforts to address past and present racial discrimination, arguing that the law requires both public and private actors to show no interest in such initiatives and to try to implement policies that are ostensibly race-blind in everything from college admissions to voting rights enforcement, regardless of how racially discriminatory such practices actually are against Black Americans. He once famously stated, “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”—that is, to stop attempting to account for or combat racism with official policy. Therefore, if the court decides in Louisiana’s favor, racially gerrymandering congressional districts to reduce and dilute Black voter power will no longer be illegal in practice. However, using race to redistrict in a way that gives Black voters their power back will be illegal.
This irrational and driven logic seems to have led Roberts and his associates to conclude that any action aimed at ensuring Black Americans’ equality and voting rights actually goes against the very constitutional amendments intended to achieve these goals. The Voting Rights Act enforces the 15th Amendment and provides the United States with its sole realistic claim to democracy for the roughly 60 years since it was passed. It does not violate the Constitution. It is not just faulty logic to claim that the VRA violates the 15th Amendment. Bad faith is involved. The Supreme Court, however, is increasingly operating under the doctrine of bad faith.
If the supreme court rules in favor of the “non-African-American” voters and vacates what is left of the Voting Rights Act, as they are expected to, then a decision will probably come down sometime in June, just a few months before the November 2026 midterms. It is anticipated that the racial gerrymandering that results will give Republicans 19 House seats.
