The Supreme Court prepares to end voting rights as we know it

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to hide what you are doing in Washington, announce it on a Friday evening in the heat of August. Better yet, in place of clarity, reference some pages in another document, so that people have to track that down and read it in order to grasp what you are telling them.

That is precisely what the Supreme Court did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: The Republican-appointed justices have decided it is time to fully destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Sixty years ago, the Voting Rights Act ended the Jim Crow regime and transformed the country, finally, into a multiracial democracy—albeit an imperfect one. But, with the court’s quiet announcement it would return to a paused case, the justices are now preparing to take us back to a time when elected officials at all levels of government were white, and the rights of minorities were trampled. The court’s eventual decision will impact how political maps are drawn, and will certainly hasten the precipitous decline of American democracy.

In its most recent term, the justices heard oral arguments in a redistricting case out of Louisiana. The state’s population is one-third Black, but after the 2020 census, the Louisiana legislature drew a Congressional map for its six seats with just one majority-Black district. After two courts found that this map violated the Voting Rights Act’s mandate that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, the legislature drew a new map with two Black-majority districts. That should have been the end of the saga, but a group of non-Black voters sued, arguing that the consideration of race in creating a second minority-majority district violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

It’s a perverse argument. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce the vision of equality enacted that animated the 14th and 15th Amendments. Indeed, the VRA was enacted under Congress’ express authority to use legislation to enforce the equal protection and voting rights guarantees of the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Now, Republican lawyers are attacking the law, arguing that equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters. The amendments that ushered in a Second Founding of political equality are being reinterpreted to resurrect white supremacy.

Under the Roberts Court, equal protection has become a sword to wield against programs, policies, and laws intended to create an equal system. The lingering Louisiana case now presents the Republican justices an opportunity to hollow out one of the few remaining protections of the VRA, the requirement of minority-majority districts, under this twisted reasoning.

Last term, rather than decide the case, the court punted on its final day of opinions in June. Then, on Friday night, it announced it would rehear the case in the coming term. This time, the court wants the parties to submit briefs on “Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

The court’s Friday order doesn’t mention the VRA. For that, you have to follow the breadcrumbs it leaves by referring to three pages from the brief of the non-Black voters. In those pages, the litigants argue using race as a factor in drawing district maps under the VRA is unconstitutional, and that the time has come for the court to eliminate the use of race in political-map drawing. The court is accepting this invitation.

The Supreme Court’s assault on democracy and President Donald Trump’s are tightly intertwined. On Sunday, Democrats in the Texas House fled their state in order to block the Republican majority’s plans to redraw its Congressional map to create five new GOP seats in Congress—and help Republicans hold the House after the 2026 midterms. The plan came down from Washington; supported by Trump and given a veneer of respectability by a legally-ludicrous DOJ letter to Texas leaders alleging five seats held by Black and Latino representatives are illegal racial gerrymanders and requesting they redraw the map. Assuming new lines are enacted, a state with only a small majority of Republican voters will have boldly pushed through a map that gives three-quarters of its congressional seats to the GOP.

Trump may be behind this plan, but it was the Supreme Court that made such brazen partisan gerrymandering possible. In 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, a 5-4 GOP majority announced federal courts could not hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering claims. Texas, and any other state that doesn’t have its own constitutional checks on gerrymandering, were greenlit to go ahead and rig their maps as much as possible. Nevermind that when the politicians pick their voters, the democratic mechanism of voting is diminished, if not extinguished.

Now, consider what might happen in the 2026 midterms and beyond if states are not only free to engage in partisan gerrymanders, but, as the GOP justices are presumably preparing to make reality, free from an obligation to create majority-minority districts. This week, UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen laid out the consequences in Slate: “It would end what has been the most successful way that Black and other minority voters have gotten fair representation in Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies. It would be an earthquake in politics and make our legislative bodies whiter and our protection for minority voters greatly diminished.”

Perhaps this sea change will come next June, when the court generally releases its biggest decisions at the end of the term. But the court set an early October due date for the new briefs, leaving open the possibility that if the Republican-appointed majority wants to give their party another leg up in the midterms, it could hear the case again this fall and release an opinion by January, giving states enough time to rush through new maps that replace minority (and usually Democratic) seats with white Republican ones in time for the midterms. Not all gerrymanders are enacted by authoritarians, but authoritarians use gerrymandering to rig elections and hold onto power.

Whenever the justices release their opinion, they will undoubtedly couch the decision in principles of fairness, equality, and even democracy. But the movement to destroy the Voting Rights Act is closely tied to the MAGA movement and the Republican Party it has taken over. Take, for example, the man who represents the non-Black litigant voters from Louisiana, who wrote the brief that the justices are likely to turn into law, a Missouri lawyer named Edward Greim. As I wrote earlier this year, “In 2020, Greim was one of the lawyers who tried to halt vote-counting in order to help President Donald Trump win the election. According to the Wisconsin Examiner, Greim later represented a fake elector from Wisconsin who was part of the plot to overturn the election results.” According to Politico, he also represented seven witnesses before the January 6 Select Committee investigation.

There are different ways to rig an election. Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 was one of them. This is another. Neither is compatible with multiracial democracy as we have known for the last 60 years.