Justices Gut Voting Rights To Shield GOP Majority -- And Their Own Disgrace
What a happy coincidence for House Republicans that the Supreme Court's conservative bloc found a way to help preserve their party's Congressional majority, apparently just in time for the 2026 midterm elections. Without the timely intervention of the right-wing justices, a Democratic wave loomed over the White House and Capitol Hill -- which threatened not only the plans of the Trump administration, but the corrupt conduct of the High Court itself.
Masterminded by Chief Justice John Roberts and written by his ideological sidekick Justice Samuel Alito, last week's decision in Louisiana v. Callais not only eviscerated the last remaining protections of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, but immediately propelled a fresh wave of partisan redistricting across the South. This was the entirely predictable result of a series of Supreme Court decisions that have undermined racial equality while encouraging white majority legislatures to redraw Congressional maps as a means to ensure perpetual power for the GOP.
And all this was done with self-righteous zeal in the name of "racial neutrality," good government, and Constitutional jurisprudence.
The court's critics have noted how little remains of those traditional values after two decades of the Roberts court. Since the majority overturned Roe v. Wade, women saw yet another step in the diminution of their control over their own bodies and health, an attack on their autonomy that is already costing innocent lives in the most backward states. Now in Callais, Black and Latino Americans see the razing of minority political power in the most segregated regions and the return of Jim Crow, delivered by a party that countenances unabashed racism in its ranks.
Alito's justification for abandoning decades of precedent -- and the clear textual purpose of the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- made little logical sense. Rather than determining whether a state's Congressional district map imposed the effect of a racial hierarchy on state voters, he ruled, the court would demand proof of racist intent on the part of legislators who drew that map. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, the impossibility of knowing or proving what was in the minds of those legislators is obvious. It is also a completely invented standard.
Alito claimed wrongly that recent presidential elections show that the nation has progressed beyond the remedies imposed by the Voting Rights Act, because Black voter turnout was higher than white turnout in two of the most recent presidential elections. Of course, turnout for Congressional elections is different in midterms -- and the years that Alito cherrypicked to make his argument happened to be those when Barack Obama, America's first Black major-party presidential nominee, was on the ballot.
But with their ire provoked by what Alito described as an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander" in Louisiana, the justices feel justified in even the most dishonest discourse. That is why both Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh could support this devastating decision, despite having voted precisely the opposite way only three years ago. In the case of Allen v. Alabama, court found that state legislators had discriminated against the state's Black voters by dividing them up among seven districts to prevent the election of more than one Black member of Congress. Kavanaugh and Roberts, along with the court's liberal minority, rejected the state's argument -- identical to Alito's argument now -- that the plaintiffs had to prove racist intent to trigger the Voting Rights Act's protections.
The result was a new Congressional map in Alabama, drawn by a special master, that offered Black voters the opportunity to elect two members -- who both happen to be Democrats.
What has changed since Kavanaugh and Roberts endorsed that wholly just outcome? Only two things: The 2024 election of Donald Trump and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, which Republicans on the court plainly aim to preserve against increasingly long odds in this year's midterm election -- and the likelihood that if Democrats regain the majority in either or both chambers, then this historically corrupt Supreme Court majority will find itself confronting investigative scrutiny, legislative challenge, and a strong possibility that Trump, the authoritarian they have so brazenly empowered, will not be able to nominate any more constitutional vandals of their ilk.
These right-wing justices, despite their whine about "racial gerrymandering," showed that they have no problem with partisan gerrymandering that has an undeniable racial impact on minority voters. It is fair to assume that among the reasons, beyond their own ideological loyalties, is the urge to protect their own misconduct from the embarrassing oversight that will surely ensue when power changes hands again.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is now available wherever books are sold.
