A longtime goal of the conservative legal movement was accomplished Wednesday: gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Supreme Court of Louisiana v. Calais","Add":{"Target": :"New","Property":(),"url": :"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/29/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-louisiana-00898123","_Identification": :"0000019d-db58-df48-a9bf-dfdb03d10004","_Type": :"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_Identification": :"0000019d-db58-df48-a9bf-dfdb03d10005","_Type": :"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>In 6-3 decision Louisiana vs. CalaisA case challenging the drawing of the second majority-black district in the state left a landmark civil rights law on the books. But the liberal minority on the court and prominent legal scholars argue that the racial protections in the law were so dramatically weakened that they became effectively useless.
The decision, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, marked “the latest chapter in the majority’s now complete demolition” of the law.
“There is very little left,” said NAACP general counsel Kristen Clarke, who led the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration. “There are some small protections regarding language access, a significant ban on voter intimidation, but very little is left. This is a dark day in our democracy.”
The immediate impact of the decision on the upcoming midterms is not yet known, with primaries already underway in several states. But observers on both sides of the aisle expect dramatic changes to the state’s maps by the 2028 elections — especially across the South. Critics of the decision, including the court’s liberal minority, argue that it will make it too easy for mapmakers to draw political lines that would dilute minorities’ voting power under the guise of doing so purely for partisan gain.
Conservatives have long argued that VRA cases have turned from a genuine need to protect racial minorities into a partisan tool to lock up seats for Democrats. Now that conservative judges have completed their more than decade-long march to gut the law in a series of major decisions, they appear to be on their way to victory.
“For decades the left has spent hundreds of millions of dollars dividing Americans along racial lines in a cynical pursuit of partisan power in the form of civil rights enforcement,” Adam Kincaid, president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said in a statement. “Race-based redistricting is an abhorrent practice prohibited by our color-blind Constitution and now the Supreme Court has restored the Voting Rights Act to its proper context.”
at the origin of calais The ruling concerns Section 2 of the VRA, a provision of the law that broadly outlaws voting discrimination based on race. For decades, courts and lawmakers have interpreted it 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 gerrymandered dozens of majority-minority districts for Congress – districts where minority voters are either outright or close to majority voters – so those communities have the ability to elect candidates of their choice.
But Justice Samuel Alito’s decision Wednesday, in which he joined with the rest of the high court’s conservative faction, resets the test that determines whether minority voters are being discriminated against.
This is not enough to demonstrate a discriminatory outcome, as has largely been the case previously; There must be evidence of discriminatory intent, he wrote for the court’s majority, or “a strong presumption that the state intentionally drew its districts to give minority voters fewer opportunities because of their race.”
Some scholars say it would be incredibly difficult to overcome.
Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School who served as an adviser on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said, “It will be not only difficult to bring future VRA challenges in any state, but very difficult indeed.”
Conservatives have long argued that the country has changed dramatically since the VRA was first signed into law in 1965. In modern America with a racially polarized electorate, outcome-based testing has effectively turned challenges based on race into a proxy for partisanship, where black and Latino voters generally lean Democratic. They argue that this is especially the case after the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that claims of partisan gerrymander were not warranted.
Alito cited that argument repeatedly in his landmark decision.
Alito wrote, “There has been widespread social change throughout the country and especially in the South.” “In a state where both parties enjoy substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference, a plaintiff could easily exploit §2 for partisan purposes, ‘by repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.'”
Under a new test written by Alito, challengers must now produce new suggested maps that “cannot use race as a criterion for districting” while still showing minority voters being disenfranchised. They must also prove that any losses are not the result of partisan-driven outcomes, or other acceptable goals such as protecting incumbents.
“Merely pointing to intra-party racial polarization proves nothing,” Alito writes, “because ‘a jurisdiction can engage in constitutional political gore even if it happens that the most loyal Democrats are black Democrats and even if the state conscious Of that fact.
Overall, “it’s hard to overstate how much this weakens the Voting Rights Act,” Rick Hasen wrote, A prominent election law scholar at UCLA Law Who have 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 more than a decade of gutting the law..
Shelby Countyone of the first major shocks of","Add":{"Target": :"New","Property":(),"url": :"https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-ruling-093324","_Identification": :"0000019d-db58-df48-a9bf-dfdb03d20006","_Type": :"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_Identification": :"0000019d-db58-df48-a9bf-dfdb03d20007","_Type": :"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}”>was in 2013 Shelby CountyWhere the court struck down a separate part of the VRA that determined which states and counties must face “preclearance”—approval from either the Justice Department or a federal court—before changing voting laws, including across congressional and legislative lines.
The decision was issued in part due to the court’s majority saying that the formula used to determine jurisdictions with discriminatory histories was outdated. Several decisions since then have further tightened the Voting Rights Act and Section 2 in particular, except for a surprise 2023 decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined liberals to leave largely intact the remainder of the law.
The decision written by Alito was, on paper, not the end of Section 2 enforcement of the VRA, which is the most consequential part of the remaining law. 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 full redistricting—which was signed only by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Still, in the long term, it could mark the end of enforceable Section 2 protections as states embark on another round of mapmaking, leaving the law a “dead letter,” Kagan wrote.
This decision is not just about Louisiana, but “it is about many other districts, particularly in the South, that have given minority citizens, and especially African Americans, a meaningful political voice over the last half century,” he warned. “After today, those districts will exist only at tolerance, and probably not for much longer.”
Andrew Howard contributed to this report.
