Supreme Court Eviscerates The Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court dealt the landmark Voting Rights Act a significant blow on Wednesday in a 6-3 ruling that leaves the historic law “all but a dead letter,” according to Justice Elena Kagan.

In the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by the court’s other five conservatives, the court invalidated a Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana as an illegal racial gerrymander. Central to the case was a question about Article 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that result in a “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote based on race, and whether race-based redistricting could legally be used to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The majority asserted that it could not, and that plaintiffs must now show that “intentional discrimination” led to the decision to not draw a minority legislative district.

This makes it effectively impossible for a Voting Rights Act challenge to win in court without a clear showing of racial animus, and it will nullify the law’s impact.

“When [Section 2] of the Act is properly interpreted, it imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” Alito wrote for the majority. “Properly understood, [Section 2] thus does not intrude on States’ prerogative to draw districts based on nonracial factors, including to achieve partisan advantage.”

In his decision, Alito notes “four historical developments” as reasons that it is fine to dismantle the landmark civil rights law. “[V]ast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” he writes to argue that racism is not as much of a problem anymore. That means one-party rule is no longer a concern in the South, as it was under Jim Crow.

The court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause approved partisan gerrymandering by denying the ability of federal courts to hear such challenges. Importantly, for Alito, this means “litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” Therefore, a white majority that votes for Republicans could eliminate Black districts that elect Democrats and the court will see it as merely partisan politicking.

Finally, Alito views the use of computers in redistricting as capable of drawing districts that aim for racial neutrality. This would, in effect, enable the exclusion of Black- and Latino-majority districts in many cases.

The court’s decision strips it of “any remnant or modicum of credibility,” said Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.

“What the court has done today is to recast the Reconstruction amendments as Redemption amendments — as prioritizing white grievance over racial justice,” said Nelson, who argued on behalf of Black Louisianans in the Callais case.

This decision is just the latest in an escalating series of judicial attacks on the historic civil rights law. But it marks “the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” Kagan wrote in her dissent, joined by the court’s other two liberal justices.

The immediate impact is not known, but it may lead some states to challenge Black and Latino majority districts as illegal racial gerrymanders, potentially reducing their representation in legislative seats from Congress all the way down to county commissions. With the Voting Rights Act now left nearly useless, Black and Latino plaintiffs will not be able to challenge the demolition of their political representation. And since Black and Latino voters have historically preferred to elect Democrats, this is likely to also have the effect of further tilting the House toward Republicans.

“After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long,” Kagan wrote. “If other States follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. And minority representation in government institutions will sharply decline.”

The first such casualty will likely occur in Florida, where the state House passed a new map that eliminates four Democratic House seats. While it was under consideration before the Callais decision dropped, the map’s redrawing of Black and Latino districts will now be impossible to challenge under Alito’s opinion.

Other states may follow suit, although it will be hard for those that have already held primaries to do so ahead of the 2026 midterms. If all GOP-run states were to eliminate their districts created under the Voting Rights Act, it could swing upward of 19 seats from Democrats to Republicans.

Enacted in 1965 following the historic civil rights march from Selma, Alabama, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Voting Rights Act officially ended Jim Crow election schemes that prevented Black people from voting in the South. It also established legal procedures through Section 2 for citizens to challenge election laws and legislative maps as racially discriminatory and the requirement that states and municipalities with a history of racial discrimination — mostly the former Confederacy — preclear election laws and maps with the Department of Justice in Section 5. The result was a rapid expansion of minority representation in legislative bodies across the country, but particularly in the South.

That rapid expansion did not truly accelerate until after 1982 when Congress passed an amendment to the Voting Rights Act in response to the Supreme Court decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden, which said courts could only find a violation under the act if they found intentional discrimination. The 1982 amendment overturned that ruling by stating that courts could look to discriminatory impact without determining whether there was intentional discrimination. This decision allowed the creation of the vast majority of districts that have elected most of the Black and Latino members of Congress in U.S. history.

Alito’s decision effectively overturns Congress’ 1982 Voting Rights Act update. It claims that change, which was passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis and aimed to enforce the 15th Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in elections, is in conflict with that amendment. And he does this while denying that he is even doing so.

This decision follows a long line of Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice John Roberts, who opposed the 1982 amendment as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice, to dramatically narrow the Voting Rights Act’s application.

The court’s conservative justices already gutted Section 5’s preclearance requirement in its 2013 Shelby v. Holder case. In 2021, they defanged the use of Section 2 as applied to election laws in Brnovich v. DNC. And now in Callais, they have turned Section 2’s application for redistricting into a dead letter.

As Kagan notes in her dissent, these cases are contradictory while aiming for the same goal. In Shelby v. Holder, Roberts claimed the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary because “African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.” But now Roberts joins a decision that will have the effect of reducing Black representation.

The case of Louisiana v. Callais arose from Louisiana’s redistricting in 2021, when the state’s Republican-led government largely maintained the state’s existing congressional maps. Black Louisianans sued under the Voting Rights Act with a claim that the map failed to provide the state’s Black population with the ability to elect representatives of their choosing by only drawing one majority-Black district. A lower court sided with the Black plaintiffs and ordered Louisiana to draw a second Black congressional district.

Meanwhile, a similar case out of Alabama, Allen v. Milligan, made its way to the Supreme Court in 2022. In a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled that Alabama must draw a second Black-majority congressional district under the Voting Rights Act. That decision also applied to the Louisiana case, which halted any further appeals by the state.

After the state adopted a map that created a second Black-majority district and protected incumbent Republicans like Speaker Mike Johnson, a group of white Louisianans sued, claiming that the new map discriminated against white people. At first, the state argued against this challenge alongside the original Black plaintiffs. But then the Supreme Court took up the case with a brand new question: whether the Voting Rights Act’s remedy for legislative maps is unconstitutional.

Louisiana suddenly switched sides to argue that the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. So did the Justice Department, newly under the control of President Donald Trump. This marked the first time the Justice Department argued against the Voting Rights Act.

Where the white Louisianans and the state argued that the Voting Rights Act’s application to redistricting should be declared unconstitutional, the Justice Department argued that courts should look to the partisan motivations of state legislatures instead of any racial implications of district maps. This would mean that a map adopted purely out of partisan motive would be acceptable, even if it denied a racial minority group that opportunity to elect their chosen representatives as prescribed by the Voting Rights Act.

This is, in effect, what the conservative justices approved in Alito’s decision. Any assertion of partisan motive now trumps any discriminatory result that reduces Black, Latino or other minority representation.

“[T]he State need do nothing more than announce a partisan gerrymander,” Kagan wrote. “Assuming the State has left behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect), Section 2 will play no role.”

While the court’s decision did not nullify the Voting Rights Act, it eviscerated its impact and Congress’ intent. In doing so, it marks yet another step backward in the march for justice as the Trump administration pushes harder to undo the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement.