JFC.
Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.
This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.
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And now comes Callais. Let’s not sugarcoat things: Alito’s opinion eviscerates Section 2 as applied to redistricting. He throws out the Gingles test—while denying he is doing so—and has restored a requirement that plaintiffs prove discriminatory intent when challenging district lines. Only if a computer algorithm would protect minority voters by chance do they have a chance to win such a case. What’s worse, the state can defend their maps by claiming that they were merely engaging in partisan gerrymandering. This move is thanks to what the Supreme Court wrote in the 2019 Rucho case—that though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it is out of the court’s realm to fix.
So when, say, Louisiana goes back and eliminates many Black opportunity districts in its state, it can claim it is doing so to help Republicans, not white people. That’s an outrageous proposition given the considerable overlap between those two groups in Louisiana.
What this means for the 2026 elections is uncertain. In many states, primaries are over or nearly so. It is hard to imagine a state ordering a rerunning of primaries under new districts to gut old Section 2 districts. But it’s possible. And it could affect places still redistricting for 2026, including, most importantly, Florida. It could also affect state and local elections, from school boards and city councils to state legislatures.
Justice Elena Kagan’s strenuous dissent notes all the history I’ve recounted. She then considers the retrograde turn of the Supreme Court in Shelby County and elsewhere, making the correct point that the current Supreme Court is the most hostile to voting rights in at least a century. And it is all done by Alito with subterfuge. The opinion adopts—though Alito denies it—Alito’s dissent in a 2023 case, Allen v. Milligan, holding Alabama violated the voting Rights Act in drawing its congressional districts. Callais brings back the requirement that minority voters prove discriminatory intent while denying it is doing that either—in contravention of Section 2’s text, congressional intent, and common sense.
Kagan is not fooled: It is not hyperbole when she writes: “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”
In other words, Alito knows exactly what he’s doing: making it seem like he’s not gutting the Voting Rights Act through technical language, turning both the statute and the Constitution on its head. It’s the product of his long mission: to favor the white Republicans he seems to think he represents on the Supreme Court, rather than all Americans.
This was more or less what everyone was expecting and worried about, but it doesn’t make it any less disgusting. The question is not whether Texas will do more redistricting in 2027, assuming there is still unified Republican control, it’s how ambitious the GOP will be. At this point there are no limits, and we’ve seen what that looks like in other contexts, so. We should really try to elect enough Democrats this year to make that impossible for them to accomplish.
The one minor bright spot is that any Democrat or non-wingnut pundit who still cavils at radically overhauling the corrupt SCOTUS when Dems have the opportunity can safely be pelted with rotten tomatoes and laughed out of public visibility. There’s no going back. The Trib, Texas Public Radio, The 19th, TPM, and TPM again have more.
So I guess it’s okay to break the law (Section 2 is still law) as long as it is for partisan purposes.