All,
The historically and eternally vicious, vile, and despicable white supremacist attack/assault on the human, constitutional, and civil rights of African American citizens continues running amok in the 21st century just as it did in the last four centuries in the “Western world” as the overwhelming majority of not only white politicians but white American citizens generally (and across the board of both class and gender divisions) throughout the nation continues to uphold, support, excuse, justify, aid, and abet the outright brutal oppression, exploitation, and homicidal destruction of their (so-called) “fellow American citizens”. The Supreme Court and the national judicial system in general, U.S. federal and state governments, Congress, most of the national media, corporations, violently racist vigilante forces, and the U.S. presidency have all continued to openly work both together and separately in a deadly solidarity of interests ruled with an iron fist and fueled by the most powerful and deadly ideology by far in the world outside of global capitalism itself. The only possible remedy for this ongoing racial and political deathtrap’ we have the unmitigated gall and criminal arrogance and stupidity to call the “United States” is social, economic, and cultural revolution, and that is currently about as far from being anywhere near a possibility as the fartherest star in the entire galaxy. Meanwhile the U.S. war on our very humanity rages in this fascist hellhole as we vainly attempt to assert ourselves as independent citizens and human subjects in a world consciously built both domestically and globally to sabotage and destroy our very existence as individual and collective subjects in a new world that we help to build, maintain, and expand in spite of our enemy’s desires otherwise.
Kofi
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/29/supreme-court-louisiana-congressional-map-case-ruling
US supreme court
The historically and eternally vicious, vile, and despicable white supremacist attack/assault on the human, constitutional, and civil rights of African American citizens continues running amok in the 21st century just as it did in the last four centuries in the “Western world” as the overwhelming majority of not only white politicians but white American citizens generally (and across the board of both class and gender divisions) throughout the nation continues to uphold, support, excuse, justify, aid, and abet the outright brutal oppression, exploitation, and homicidal destruction of their (so-called) “fellow American citizens”. The Supreme Court and the national judicial system in general, U.S. federal and state governments, Congress, most of the national media, corporations, violently racist vigilante forces, and the U.S. presidency have all continued to openly work both together and separately in a deadly solidarity of interests ruled with an iron fist and fueled by the most powerful and deadly ideology by far in the world outside of global capitalism itself. The only possible remedy for this ongoing racial and political deathtrap’ we have the unmitigated gall and criminal arrogance and stupidity to call the “United States” is social, economic, and cultural revolution, and that is currently about as far from being anywhere near a possibility as the fartherest star in the entire galaxy. Meanwhile the U.S. war on our very humanity rages in this fascist hellhole as we vainly attempt to assert ourselves as independent citizens and human subjects in a world consciously built both domestically and globally to sabotage and destroy our very existence as individual and collective subjects in a new world that we help to build, maintain, and expand in spite of our enemy’s desires otherwise.
Kofi
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/29/supreme-court-louisiana-congressional-map-case-ruling
US supreme court
US supreme court ‘demolishes’ Voting Rights Act, gutting provision that prevented racial discrimination
Justices rule in landmark decision Louisiana must redraw congressional map, largely killing major civil rights law
by Sam Levine
29 April 2026
The Guardian (UK)
The US supreme court has ruled that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map, in a landmark decision that effectively guts a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court rendered ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting.
29 April 2026
The Guardian (UK)
The US supreme court has ruled that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map, in a landmark decision that effectively guts a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court rendered ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting.
“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, wrote for the majority opinion. “Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the middle district’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The court’s decision is a major upheaval in US civil rights law and gives lawmakers permission to draw districting plans that weaken the influence of Black and other minority voters. Some states may even rush ahead to try to redraw districts ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Asked by reporters on Wednesday whether states should redraw their congressional maps in response to the ruling, Donald Trump said: “I would.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court had now accomplished a “demolition of the Voting Rights Act”. The court’s decision on Wednesday is the latest in a series that dismantled the law, she wrote, including a major decision in 2013 case, Shelby County v Holder, that nullified another major provision in the law that required places with a history of discrimination to get changes pre-approved by the federal government before they went into effect.
“Under the court’s new view of section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. In fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.
“Today’s decision renders section 2 all but a dead letter,” she continued. “The decision here is about Louisiana’s district 6. But so too it is about Louisiana’s district 2. And so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the south, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice. After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.”
At the heart of the case, Louisiana v Callais, was a question of how much lawmakers are allowed to consider race when they redraw districts to ensure that Black voters are adequately represented. The supreme court initially heard oral arguments in the case last March, but took the unusual step of asking lawyers to re-argue the case last fall. In setting the case for a re-argument, the justices raised the stakes of the case, asking lawyers to focus on whether section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was constitutional.
In its decision on Wednesday, the court’s majority stopped short of saying outright that section 2 was unconstitutional. Instead, the majority significantly reworked a three-part test that plaintiffs need to pass in order to win a section 2 redistricting test. The new test is significantly harder to pass and designed to require plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination – an extremely difficult burden.
“In short, section 2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote.
Such a declaration “is not only out of line with text, it is also out of line with the history of section 2”, Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles wrote in a blogpost. In 1982, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to clarify that proving intentional discrimination was not necessary to win a case under section 2.
For decades, the first part of the three-part test in a section 2 lawsuit has required plaintiffs to show the minority group alleging discrimination is large and compact enough to constitute a majority in a single-member district. Alito’s decision adds two new requirements to this – plaintiffs may not consider race in drawing a hypothetical alternative map and must also ensure that it achieves the state’s traditional districting criteria and partisan goals.
That change alone is a major blow to the Voting Rights Act. In the US south, voting is highly racially polarized, so drawing a district that prevents racial discrimination is likely to also affect the partisan makeup of a map. It may be impossible for a state to achieve its partisan goals without discriminating against minority voters.
It also gives lawmakers virtually unlimited leeway to justify drawing districts that discriminate based on race, Kagan wrote.
“Suppose the state asserted that it drew the lines to protect an incumbent, who just so happened to be favored by Black residents,” she wrote. “The possibilities are endless. And each would have the same result. Because a section 2 plaintiff ’s map could not as well advance the bespoke political (or other) goal(s) favoring the Black voters’ chosen candidate, the suit would fail – even if non-Black votes, election year in and election year out, had been made to count for nothing.”
The second and third conditions of the traditional test requires plaintiffs to show that the minority group is politically cohesive and that the majority group votes as a bloc to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate. Alito’s new test requires plaintiffs to show that cohesiveness is driven specifically by race and not by party. That is extremely hard to do when race and party are often closely intertwined.
“So in offering evidence of polarized voting preferences, a plaintiff must remove from the equation … polarized voting preferences,” Kagan wrote. “Partisan difference is the way those divergent preferences are expressed – and the way one racial group’s vote can swamp another’s, again and again.”
As part of section 2 cases, courts have also looked at the “totality of circumstances” to assess whether the political process is equally open to minority voters. Plaintiffs often offer evidence of ongoing effects of the legacy of discrimination to show that discrimination still exists. The court’s new test says that evaluation must be focused on “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting”. Such direct evidence of intentional racial discrimination rarely exists.
“Discrimination that occurred some time ago, as well as present-day disparities that are characterized as the ongoing ‘effects of societal discrimination,’ are entitled to much less weight,” Alito wrote.
Civil rights advocates were quick to denounce the decision. Derrick Johnson, the head of the NAACP, said in a statement: “The supreme court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy.” Barack Obama said the decision allowed “state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities – so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias’”.
Republicans, including Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill, praised the decision. “The supreme court has ended Louisiana’s long-running nightmare of federal courts coercing the state to draw a racially discriminatory map. That was always unconstitutional – and this is a seismic decision reaffirming equal protection under our nation’s laws,” she said.
The White House and called the decision “a complete and total victory”.
“The color of one’s skin should not dictate which congressional district you belong in,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “We commend the court for putting an end to the unconstitutional abuse of the Voting Rights Act and protecting civil rights.”
After the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled state legislature drew a new congressional map in which Black voters comprised a majority in just one district despite being about a third of the state’s population. A group of Black voters sued the state in 2022 under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the map diluted the influence of Black voters in the state by packing them into one district and spreading them out over the remaining ones.
The Black voters won the case and a federal judge blocked Louisiana from using the map and instructed the state to draw a new one with a second majority-Black district. The state complied, drawing a new map with a second majority-Black congressional district that stretches diagonally across the state from Shreveport to Baton Rouge.
But a group of non-Black voters challenged that new map, claiming that voters had unlawfully been sorted by their race in violation of the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. A three-judge panel agreed with those plaintiffs and blocked the new map from going into effect last year. That decision was paused by the supreme court and the remedial map was used in the 2024 election last fall’s election. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the seat.
During oral arguments in March, Edward Greim, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said it was obvious that race had predominated in drawing the district because it was so irregularly shaped.
But lawyers representing Louisiana as well as the Black voters who brought the original claim said that there was a clear explanation for the strange shape. When they were drawing the map, Louisiana Republicans had wanted to preserve the safe seats of the House speaker, Mike Johnson; the House majority leader, Steve Scalise; and Julia Letlow, a member of the House appropriations committee. They had rejected the possibility of drawing a more compact district in order to preserve those seats.
Janai Nelson, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued in defense of Louisiana’s existing maps at the supreme court last year, said that although there might be theoretical opportunities to bring section 2 claims, she did not see any practical way of doing so right now. “There’s no mincing words here. This is a day of tremendous loss,” she said.
Press Robinson, a Louisiana voter who led an earlier lawsuit that resulted in the creation of the second majority-Black congressional district in the state, also expressed disappointment in the decision.
“As a citizen of Louisiana and living in a state where a third of the population are people of color, I see that our state legislature, the governor, all of the main offices in the state, or super-majority, follow the Republican party, and they are determined to see to it that we not have a voice at all,” he said.
The US supreme court has ruled that Louisiana will have to redraw its congressional map, in a landmark decision that effectively guts a major section of the Voting Rights Act.
In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, the court rendered ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting.
“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, wrote for the majority opinion. “Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the middle district’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The court’s decision is a major upheaval in US civil rights law and gives lawmakers permission to draw districting plans that weaken the influence of Black and other minority voters. Some states may even rush ahead to try to redraw districts ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Asked by reporters on Wednesday whether states should redraw their congressional maps in response to the ruling, Donald Trump said: “I would.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court had now accomplished a “demolition of the Voting Rights Act”. The court’s decision on Wednesday is the latest in a series that dismantled the law, she wrote, including a major decision in 2013 case, Shelby County v Holder, that nullified another major provision in the law that required places with a history of discrimination to get changes pre-approved by the federal government before they went into effect.
“Under the court’s new view of section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in a dissent that was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. In fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.
“Today’s decision renders section 2 all but a dead letter,” she continued. “The decision here is about Louisiana’s district 6. But so too it is about Louisiana’s district 2. And so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the south, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice. After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.”
At the heart of the case, Louisiana v Callais, was a question of how much lawmakers are allowed to consider race when they redraw districts to ensure that Black voters are adequately represented. The supreme court initially heard oral arguments in the case last March, but took the unusual step of asking lawyers to re-argue the case last fall. In setting the case for a re-argument, the justices raised the stakes of the case, asking lawyers to focus on whether section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was constitutional.
In its decision on Wednesday, the court’s majority stopped short of saying outright that section 2 was unconstitutional. Instead, the majority significantly reworked a three-part test that plaintiffs need to pass in order to win a section 2 redistricting test. The new test is significantly harder to pass and designed to require plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination – an extremely difficult burden.
“In short, section 2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote.
Such a declaration “is not only out of line with text, it is also out of line with the history of section 2”, Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles wrote in a blogpost. In 1982, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to clarify that proving intentional discrimination was not necessary to win a case under section 2.
For decades, the first part of the three-part test in a section 2 lawsuit has required plaintiffs to show the minority group alleging discrimination is large and compact enough to constitute a majority in a single-member district. Alito’s decision adds two new requirements to this – plaintiffs may not consider race in drawing a hypothetical alternative map and must also ensure that it achieves the state’s traditional districting criteria and partisan goals.
That change alone is a major blow to the Voting Rights Act. In the US south, voting is highly racially polarized, so drawing a district that prevents racial discrimination is likely to also affect the partisan makeup of a map. It may be impossible for a state to achieve its partisan goals without discriminating against minority voters.
It also gives lawmakers virtually unlimited leeway to justify drawing districts that discriminate based on race, Kagan wrote.
“Suppose the state asserted that it drew the lines to protect an incumbent, who just so happened to be favored by Black residents,” she wrote. “The possibilities are endless. And each would have the same result. Because a section 2 plaintiff ’s map could not as well advance the bespoke political (or other) goal(s) favoring the Black voters’ chosen candidate, the suit would fail – even if non-Black votes, election year in and election year out, had been made to count for nothing.”
The second and third conditions of the traditional test requires plaintiffs to show that the minority group is politically cohesive and that the majority group votes as a bloc to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate. Alito’s new test requires plaintiffs to show that cohesiveness is driven specifically by race and not by party. That is extremely hard to do when race and party are often closely intertwined.
“So in offering evidence of polarized voting preferences, a plaintiff must remove from the equation … polarized voting preferences,” Kagan wrote. “Partisan difference is the way those divergent preferences are expressed – and the way one racial group’s vote can swamp another’s, again and again.”
As part of section 2 cases, courts have also looked at the “totality of circumstances” to assess whether the political process is equally open to minority voters. Plaintiffs often offer evidence of ongoing effects of the legacy of discrimination to show that discrimination still exists. The court’s new test says that evaluation must be focused on “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting”. Such direct evidence of intentional racial discrimination rarely exists.
“Discrimination that occurred some time ago, as well as present-day disparities that are characterized as the ongoing ‘effects of societal discrimination,’ are entitled to much less weight,” Alito wrote.
Civil rights advocates were quick to denounce the decision. Derrick Johnson, the head of the NAACP, said in a statement: “The supreme court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy.” Barack Obama said the decision allowed “state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities – so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias’”.
Republicans, including Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill, praised the decision. “The supreme court has ended Louisiana’s long-running nightmare of federal courts coercing the state to draw a racially discriminatory map. That was always unconstitutional – and this is a seismic decision reaffirming equal protection under our nation’s laws,” she said.
The White House and called the decision “a complete and total victory”.
“The color of one’s skin should not dictate which congressional district you belong in,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “We commend the court for putting an end to the unconstitutional abuse of the Voting Rights Act and protecting civil rights.”
The decision comes after years of legal wrangling.
After the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled state legislature drew a new congressional map in which Black voters comprised a majority in just one district despite being about a third of the state’s population. A group of Black voters sued the state in 2022 under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the map diluted the influence of Black voters in the state by packing them into one district and spreading them out over the remaining ones.
The Black voters won the case and a federal judge blocked Louisiana from using the map and instructed the state to draw a new one with a second majority-Black district. The state complied, drawing a new map with a second majority-Black congressional district that stretches diagonally across the state from Shreveport to Baton Rouge.
But a group of non-Black voters challenged that new map, claiming that voters had unlawfully been sorted by their race in violation of the 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. A three-judge panel agreed with those plaintiffs and blocked the new map from going into effect last year. That decision was paused by the supreme court and the remedial map was used in the 2024 election last fall’s election. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the seat.
During oral arguments in March, Edward Greim, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said it was obvious that race had predominated in drawing the district because it was so irregularly shaped.
But lawyers representing Louisiana as well as the Black voters who brought the original claim said that there was a clear explanation for the strange shape. When they were drawing the map, Louisiana Republicans had wanted to preserve the safe seats of the House speaker, Mike Johnson; the House majority leader, Steve Scalise; and Julia Letlow, a member of the House appropriations committee. They had rejected the possibility of drawing a more compact district in order to preserve those seats.
Janai Nelson, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued in defense of Louisiana’s existing maps at the supreme court last year, said that although there might be theoretical opportunities to bring section 2 claims, she did not see any practical way of doing so right now. “There’s no mincing words here. This is a day of tremendous loss,” she said.
Press Robinson, a Louisiana voter who led an earlier lawsuit that resulted in the creation of the second majority-Black congressional district in the state, also expressed disappointment in the decision.
“As a citizen of Louisiana and living in a state where a third of the population are people of color, I see that our state legislature, the governor, all of the main offices in the state, or super-majority, follow the Republican party, and they are determined to see to it that we not have a voice at all,” he said.
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Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, Justice, and The Courts
Amicus On Wednesday: Justice Samuel Alito delivered the latest, probably lethal blow in the Supreme Court’s decades-long campaign against multi-racial democracy in America, with a 6-3 majority opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v Callais. In this special extra episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick talks with Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization. Nelson argued Louisiana v. Callais before the United States Supreme Court in October of 2025. Together, they examine the history ignored by the right wing majority, and look ahead to the disastrous consequences this ruling unleashes on American democracy, from school boards all the way to the halls of congress. Podcast production by Sara Burningham and Sophie Summergrad // Video production by Micah Phillips
The Supreme Court Just Killed the Voting Rights Act
Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
April 29, 2026
VIDEO:
Amicus On Wednesday: Justice Samuel Alito delivered the latest, probably lethal blow in the Supreme Court’s decades-long campaign against multi-racial democracy in America, with a 6-3 majority opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v Callais. In this special extra episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick talks with Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the nation’s premier civil rights law organization. Nelson argued Louisiana v. Callais before the United States Supreme Court in October of 2025. Together, they examine the history ignored by the right wing majority, and look ahead to the disastrous consequences this ruling unleashes on American democracy, from school boards all the way to the halls of congress. Podcast production by Sara Burningham and Sophie Summergrad // Video production by Micah Phillips
The Supreme Court Just Killed the Voting Rights Act
Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
April 29, 2026
VIDEO:
The Supreme Court just handed down Calais v. Louisiana — and the Voting Rights Act is, for all practical purposes, dead. What this ruling will do in practice is allow Republican-controlled states to wipe out majority-minority districts entirely, netting new congressional and state legislative seats. It is a travesty, and it rests on a theory of the Reconstruction Amendments that twists their meaning to allow the very discrimination they were meant to stop.
The Voting Rights Act is now a ‘dead letter’ after latest Supreme Court decision
Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision leaves the landmark civil rights law on the books — but in name only, prominent legal scholars and the liberal justices argue.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. | Andrew Medichini/AP Photo
by Zach Montellaro
4/29/2026
A long-held goal of the conservative legal movement came to fruition on Wednesday: The gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case challenging the drawing of a second majority-Black district in the state, left the landmark civil rights law on the books. But the racial protections in the law were so dramatically weakened as to render them effectively useless, the liberal minority on the court and prominent legal scholars argue.
The decision, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, marks the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition” of the law.
“Very little remains,” said NAACP general counsel Kristen Clarke, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration. “There’s some small protections with respect to language access, an important prohibition on voter intimidation, but very little remains. This is a dark day in our democracy.”
The immediate impact of the decision on the upcoming midterms is not yet known, with primaries in many states already underway. But observers on both sides of the aisle expect dramatic overhauls of state maps by the 2028 elections — particularly across the South. Critics of the decision, including those in the court’s liberal minority, argue it will make it far easier for mapmakers to draw political lines that dilute the voting power of minorities, under the guise of doing it for purely partisan advantage.
Conservatives have long argued that VRA cases morphed from a genuine need to protect racial minorities to a partisan tool for Democrats to lock up seats. Now that conservative justices have completed their decade-plus long march to slash away at the law in a series of major decisions, they’re taking a victory lap.
“For decades the left has spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeking to divide Americans along racial lines in a cynical pursuit of partisan power masquerading as civil rights enforcement,” Adam Kincaid, the president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said in a statement. “Race based redistricting is an odious practice prohibited by our colorblind Constitution and now the Supreme Court has restored the Voting Rights Act to its proper context.”
At the core of the Callais ruling is Section 2 of the VRA, a provision of the law that broadly outlaws discrimination in voting on the basis of race. For decades, courts and lawmakers have interpreted that to allow — and sometimes require — the use of racial data in redistricting, to protect the voting power of Black, Latino and Asian Americans.
States have drawn dozens of majority-minority districts in Congress — districts where minority voters made up either outright or close to a majority of voters — so those communities have the ability to elect candidates of their choosing.
But Justice Samuel Alito’s decision Wednesday, in which he was joined by the rest of the high court’s conservative bloc, resets the test in which to determine if minority voters are being discriminated against.
It is not enough to demonstrate discriminatory results, as was broadly the case previously; there must be evidence of discriminatory intent, or “a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” he wrote for the court’s majority.
Some scholars say that’s going to be an incredibly difficult bar to clear.
“It’ll be not just hard, but really really really hard,” to bring future VRA challenges “in any states that allow partisanship to infect the process,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School who served in the Biden White House as an adviser for democracy and voting rights.
Conservatives have long argued that the country has changed dramatically since the VRA was first signed into law in 1965. In a modern America with a racially polarized electorate, a results-based test has effectively turned challenges based on race into a proxy for partisanship, with Black and Latino voters generally leaning Democratic. That, they argue, is particularly the case after the Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that partisan gerrymander claims were not justiciable.
Alito repeatedly cited that rationale in his landmark ruling.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote. “In a State where both parties have substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference, a litigant can easily exploit §2 for partisan purposes by ‘repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.’”
Under a new test authored by Alito, challengers must now draw new suggested maps that “cannot use race as a districting criterion” while still showing minority voters are disadvantaged. They must also prove that any disadvantage is not the result of favoring partisanship-driven outcomes, or other permissible goals like protecting incumbents.
“Simply pointing to inter-party racial polarization proves nothing,” Alito writes, “because ‘a jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the State were conscious of that fact.’”
Taken together, “it is hard to overstate how much this weakens the Voting Rights Act,” wrote Rick Hasen, a prominent election law scholar at UCLA Law who has been critical of the court’s moves to weaken the VRA.
Wednesday’s decision is the Supreme Court’s biggest blow yet to the VRA, after chipping away at the law for over a decade.
One of the first major blows was in 2013 in Shelby County, where the court struck down a different part of the VRA that determined which states and counties must face “preclearance” — approval from either the Department of Justice or a federal court — before changing voting laws, including congressional and legislative lines.
That decision was issued, in part, due to the court’s majority saying that the formula used to determine jurisdictions with a discriminatory history was outdated. A string of decisions since then further tightened the Voting Rights Act and Section 2 in particular, save for a surprise 2023 decision that saw Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh join the liberals to leave the remainder of the law largely intact.
The Alito-authored decision was not, on paper, the end of the VRA’s Section 2 enforcement, which is far and away the most consequential part of the law remaining. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, argued for the court to go even further and rule that there is no place for the VRA in redistricting entirely — something only Justice Neil Gorsuch signed on to.
Still, longterm, it may mark the end of enforceable Section 2 protections as states embark on another round of mapmaking, rendering the law a “dead letter,” Kagan wrote.
The decision is not only about Louisiana, but “it is about the many other districts, particularly in the South, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice,” she warned. “After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.”
Andrew Howard contributed to this report.
Filed Under:
U.S. Supreme Court
NAACP
Redistricting
Samuel Alito
Voting Rights Act
2026 Elections
VIDEO: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXyHvcuIBGM/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D:
The Voting Rights Act is now a ‘dead letter’ after latest Supreme Court decision
Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision leaves the landmark civil rights law on the books — but in name only, prominent legal scholars and the liberal justices argue.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. | Andrew Medichini/AP Photo
by Zach Montellaro
4/29/2026
A long-held goal of the conservative legal movement came to fruition on Wednesday: The gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case challenging the drawing of a second majority-Black district in the state, left the landmark civil rights law on the books. But the racial protections in the law were so dramatically weakened as to render them effectively useless, the liberal minority on the court and prominent legal scholars argue.
The decision, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, marks the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition” of the law.
“Very little remains,” said NAACP general counsel Kristen Clarke, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration. “There’s some small protections with respect to language access, an important prohibition on voter intimidation, but very little remains. This is a dark day in our democracy.”
The immediate impact of the decision on the upcoming midterms is not yet known, with primaries in many states already underway. But observers on both sides of the aisle expect dramatic overhauls of state maps by the 2028 elections — particularly across the South. Critics of the decision, including those in the court’s liberal minority, argue it will make it far easier for mapmakers to draw political lines that dilute the voting power of minorities, under the guise of doing it for purely partisan advantage.
Conservatives have long argued that VRA cases morphed from a genuine need to protect racial minorities to a partisan tool for Democrats to lock up seats. Now that conservative justices have completed their decade-plus long march to slash away at the law in a series of major decisions, they’re taking a victory lap.
“For decades the left has spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeking to divide Americans along racial lines in a cynical pursuit of partisan power masquerading as civil rights enforcement,” Adam Kincaid, the president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said in a statement. “Race based redistricting is an odious practice prohibited by our colorblind Constitution and now the Supreme Court has restored the Voting Rights Act to its proper context.”
At the core of the Callais ruling is Section 2 of the VRA, a provision of the law that broadly outlaws discrimination in voting on the basis of race. For decades, courts and lawmakers have interpreted that to allow — and sometimes require — the use of racial data in redistricting, to protect the voting power of Black, Latino and Asian Americans.
States have drawn dozens of majority-minority districts in Congress — districts where minority voters made up either outright or close to a majority of voters — so those communities have the ability to elect candidates of their choosing.
But Justice Samuel Alito’s decision Wednesday, in which he was joined by the rest of the high court’s conservative bloc, resets the test in which to determine if minority voters are being discriminated against.
It is not enough to demonstrate discriminatory results, as was broadly the case previously; there must be evidence of discriminatory intent, or “a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” he wrote for the court’s majority.
Some scholars say that’s going to be an incredibly difficult bar to clear.
“It’ll be not just hard, but really really really hard,” to bring future VRA challenges “in any states that allow partisanship to infect the process,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School who served in the Biden White House as an adviser for democracy and voting rights.
Conservatives have long argued that the country has changed dramatically since the VRA was first signed into law in 1965. In a modern America with a racially polarized electorate, a results-based test has effectively turned challenges based on race into a proxy for partisanship, with Black and Latino voters generally leaning Democratic. That, they argue, is particularly the case after the Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that partisan gerrymander claims were not justiciable.
Alito repeatedly cited that rationale in his landmark ruling.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote. “In a State where both parties have substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference, a litigant can easily exploit §2 for partisan purposes by ‘repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.’”
Under a new test authored by Alito, challengers must now draw new suggested maps that “cannot use race as a districting criterion” while still showing minority voters are disadvantaged. They must also prove that any disadvantage is not the result of favoring partisanship-driven outcomes, or other permissible goals like protecting incumbents.
“Simply pointing to inter-party racial polarization proves nothing,” Alito writes, “because ‘a jurisdiction may engage in constitutional political gerrymandering, even if it so happens that the most loyal Democrats happen to be black Democrats and even if the State were conscious of that fact.’”
Taken together, “it is hard to overstate how much this weakens the Voting Rights Act,” wrote Rick Hasen, a prominent election law scholar at UCLA Law who has been critical of the court’s moves to weaken the VRA.
Wednesday’s decision is the Supreme Court’s biggest blow yet to the VRA, after chipping away at the law for over a decade.
One of the first major blows was in 2013 in Shelby County, where the court struck down a different part of the VRA that determined which states and counties must face “preclearance” — approval from either the Department of Justice or a federal court — before changing voting laws, including congressional and legislative lines.
That decision was issued, in part, due to the court’s majority saying that the formula used to determine jurisdictions with a discriminatory history was outdated. A string of decisions since then further tightened the Voting Rights Act and Section 2 in particular, save for a surprise 2023 decision that saw Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh join the liberals to leave the remainder of the law largely intact.
The Alito-authored decision was not, on paper, the end of the VRA’s Section 2 enforcement, which is far and away the most consequential part of the law remaining. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, argued for the court to go even further and rule that there is no place for the VRA in redistricting entirely — something only Justice Neil Gorsuch signed on to.
Still, longterm, it may mark the end of enforceable Section 2 protections as states embark on another round of mapmaking, rendering the law a “dead letter,” Kagan wrote.
The decision is not only about Louisiana, but “it is about the many other districts, particularly in the South, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice,” she warned. “After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.”
Andrew Howard contributed to this report.
Filed Under:
U.S. Supreme Court
NAACP
Redistricting
Samuel Alito
Voting Rights Act
2026 Elections
VIDEO: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXyHvcuIBGM/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D:
VIDEO:
THIS IS DR. EDDIE GLAUDE,
JR. @ 3:52 SPEAKING OUT PASSIONATELY ON THE SUPREME COURT DECISION TO
DESTROY THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT ON THE MS NOW PROGRAM DEADLINE: WHITE
HOUSE HOSTED BY NICOLE WALLACE ON APRIL 29, 2026:
SCOTUS Opens Door to Attack on Black Voters. “Coordinated Attack Across This Country”
Roland S. Martin
May 1, 2026
VIDEO:
#RolandMartinUnfiltered
Louisiana v. Callais is not some random ruling. The Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CBC Chair Yvette Clarke and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warn it opens the door to a coordinated attack on Black voters nationwide.
The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais Voting Rights Act ruling is being condemned as a direct threat to Black voting power. The Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warn that the decision opens the door to dismantling majority-Black districts, rigging maps, and weakening the ability of Black voters to elect candidates of choice. The fight over representation is no longer theoretical—it is unfolding in real time with direct consequences for Black political power. 🔥
The case is Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court’s major Voting Rights Act ruling
🔥 The Congressional Black Caucus calls it a coordinated attack on Black voters
🔥 Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warns progress is being “ripped away”
🔥 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez signals Democrats must respond in kind
🔥 SCOTUS opened the door to dismantling majority-Black districts
🔥 “Politicians choosing voters” replaces fair representation
🔥 The ruling puts Black political power, representation, and voting rights directly in the crosshairs
NAACP General Counsel Kristen Clarke on the gratuitous gutting of Voting Rights by SCOTUS.
FIVE MINUTE NEWS
May 3, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU57b2esk2c
The case is Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court’s major Voting Rights Act ruling
🔥 The Congressional Black Caucus calls it a coordinated attack on Black voters
🔥 Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warns progress is being “ripped away”
🔥 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez signals Democrats must respond in kind
🔥 SCOTUS opened the door to dismantling majority-Black districts
🔥 “Politicians choosing voters” replaces fair representation
🔥 The ruling puts Black political power, representation, and voting rights directly in the crosshairs
NAACP General Counsel Kristen Clarke on the gratuitous gutting of Voting Rights by SCOTUS.
FIVE MINUTE NEWS
May 3, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU57b2esk2c
THE WEEKEND SHOW with MeidasTouch
NAACP General Counsel and former Biden Civil Rights AG Kristen Clarke joins Anthony Davis to discuss the gratuitous gutting of Voting Rights by Trump’s Supreme Court and what it means for minority representation throughout the United States - only on The Weekend Show.
The Supreme Court Eviscerates the Voting Rights Act (with Wendy Weiser and Kareem Crayton)
Brennan Center for Justice
April 30, 2026
VIDEO:
NAACP General Counsel and former Biden Civil Rights AG Kristen Clarke joins Anthony Davis to discuss the gratuitous gutting of Voting Rights by Trump’s Supreme Court and what it means for minority representation throughout the United States - only on The Weekend Show.
The Supreme Court Eviscerates the Voting Rights Act (with Wendy Weiser and Kareem Crayton)
Brennan Center for Justice
April 30, 2026
VIDEO:
The Briefing Podcast with Michael Waldman
This week, the Supreme Court struck down the remaining enforcement tool of the Voting Rights Act — the law often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. In this emergency episode, Brennan Center experts analyze the ruling and assess what it will mean for voters in 2026 and beyond. They also discuss what Congress should do — right now — to preserve the equal right to vote. Recorded on April 30, 2026 The Brennan Center is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to repair, revitalize, and defend our systems of democracy and justice so that they work for all Americans. The Brennan Center cannot support or oppose any candidate for office.
BREAKING: SCOTUS Deals Another Blow to Multiracial Democracy
Strict Scrutiny
April 29, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIVZZuI5FUU
This week, the Supreme Court struck down the remaining enforcement tool of the Voting Rights Act — the law often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. In this emergency episode, Brennan Center experts analyze the ruling and assess what it will mean for voters in 2026 and beyond. They also discuss what Congress should do — right now — to preserve the equal right to vote. Recorded on April 30, 2026 The Brennan Center is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to repair, revitalize, and defend our systems of democracy and justice so that they work for all Americans. The Brennan Center cannot support or oppose any candidate for office.
BREAKING: SCOTUS Deals Another Blow to Multiracial Democracy
Strict Scrutiny
April 29, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIVZZuI5FUU
Strict Scrutiny
BREAKING: SCOTUS Deals Another Blow to Multiracial Democracy
BREAKING: SCOTUS Deals Another Blow to Multiracial Democracy
Kate and Leah are joined by Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias to break down the Supreme Court’s shameful assault on multiracial democracy with its ruling on the Voting Rights Act case, Louisiana v. Callais. Hosted by three badass constitutional law professors– Leah Litman, Kate Shaw, and Melissa Murray– Strict Scrutiny provides in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities. Each week, Leah, Kate, and Melissa break down the latest headlines and biggest legal questions facing our country, emphasizing what it all means for our daily lives. Whether you’re a lawyer or law student, or you’re just here for the messy legal drama, Strict Scrutiny has you covered. New episodes out every Monday… plus bonuses whenever SCOTUS takes away another one of our rights. Check out Strict Scrutiny every Monday here or wherever you get your podcasts!
https://crooked.com/podcast-series/st...
Photos courtesy of AP Photo Archive
https://crooked.com/podcast-series/st...
Photos courtesy of AP Photo Archive
