The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday on the Voting Rights Act is a mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach. Six conservative justices voted to weaken the act, in that way substituting their own judgment for that of Congress, which reauthorized the law 20 years ago with overwhelming bipartisan support, including a unanimous vote in the Senate. With this ruling, the court has acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges.
Justice Elena Kagan, voting in the minority, struck the right tone: “I dissent because Congress elected otherwise,” she wrote. “I dissent because the court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote.”
The effects will be significant. The ruling, in Louisiana v. Callais, makes it easier for states to draw districts for Congress, state legislatures and local councils that elect the candidates favored by white voting blocs. The officials who make the maps no longer need to worry much about whether they are sprinkling Black voters across many districts and eliminating majority Black districts.
The reality is that in the name of disentangling race from politics, the Supreme Court has given white voters more power at the expense of racial minorities.
We recognize that people of different races now vote more similarly than they once did. That is promising. But racially polarized voting remains common in much of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, where Black voters lean heavily Democratic and white voters heavily Republican. Because the Supreme Court has previously allowed partisan gerrymandering, those states will be free to draw districts that elect candidates whom only a small percentage of Black voters support. Those politicians are also likely to be white.
It is impossible not to notice the partisan nature of the ruling. The six justices in the majority are the six nominated by Republican presidents, and they have likely made it easier for the party that chose them to hold power in Congress. Wednesday’s decision may shift nine seats in Southern states from Democratic to Republican hands, some in the 2026 cycle and more in years to come. State legislatures and local bodies will surely tilt in the same direction.
Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion claims merely to “update” the redistricting test courts have used in Voting Rights Act cases for 40 years. It does so, he argues, by requiring that plaintiffs show a strong likelihood that the state was intentionally disempowering Black votes. In reality, the decision has eviscerated the old standard because proving intent is extremely difficult. As a result, states will now be able to slice minority voters into small and powerless slivers, as long as they can claim to do so for partisan rather than racial reasons.
Consider the effect in Louisiana. That state had no Black representation in Congress for more than a century after the end of Reconstruction, and finally elected one Black member in 1990. A second Black member served from 1993 to 1997. In 2001 Louisiana redrew its map to revert to only one majority-Black congressional district out of six, in a state where the Black population is now about one-third of the total.
This case began in 2022, when the state had only one Black member of Congress and a group of Black voters sued over the state’s map. The plaintiffs won in the lower courts, based on extensive evidence of racially polarized voting, and Louisiana then redrew its map in 2024 to include two majority-Black congressional districts.
A group of white voters sued over the new map. Now that the Supreme Court has sided with them, Louisiana is free to go back to its 2022 map — or to attempt a map with no realistic opportunity at all for Black voters to elect candidates of their choice. As long as the state says it is trying to take power from Democrats, not Black people, it will be on safe legal ground.
Wednesday’s result is not what Congress intended. When Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982, it rejected requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination. The amended law instead required plaintiffs to prove that the political process, including redistricting, was “not equally open to participation” by a minority group in the sense that “its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” A 1986 Supreme Court ruling fleshed out the standard. If Black voters were sufficiently numerous and compact, and if they also supported one party far more than white voters did, then the protections of the Voting Rights Act kicked in. That test was reasonable, and Wednesday’s ruling has effectively replaced it.
So much about the ruling is upside down. In 2019, in a different case, Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court recognized an obvious truth: Partisan gerrymandering is a problem for American democracy. But the majority then said that federal courts could not find a map unconstitutional because it was drawn for partisan reasons. As a result, restrictions on racial gerrymandering remained one of the biggest constraints on unfair redistricting, at least until Wednesday.
The Supreme Court has used dubious reasoning to issue a ruling that will likely help the Republican Party and increase the number of white members of Congress and state legislatures. That ruling will lead to even more suspicion that the court prioritizes partisanship over principle.
