Two conservative justices have systematically dismantled one of America's most powerful civil rights protections, with this week's Supreme Court ruling marking the culmination of a coordinated legal assault on voting rights that stretches back decades.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito authored or joined five major decisions that progressively weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Their latest ruling, Louisiana v Callais, struck down a provision that for 40 years had prevented states from diluting the political power of Black voters through gerrymandered districts.
The 6-3 decision, written by Alito, rejected Louisiana's creation of a second district where African American voters, roughly one-third of the state's population, could elect candidates of their choice. The court labeled this effort "unconstitutional racial gerrymandering."
The ruling inverted the logic of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, using a provision designed to protect minorities to shield states from remedies aimed at centuries of racial discrimination in voting. Justice Elena Kagan's dissent highlighted the irony, noting the Roberts court "has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act" for over a decade.
Roberts and Alito arrived at the Supreme Court within four months of each other in 2005-2006, both shaped by their work as Reagan-era lawyers who opposed what they viewed as excessive civil rights enforcement. Their intellectual alignment on voting rights has proven remarkably consistent.
Alito's opposition dates to his Princeton days, when he became absorbed in constitutional arguments against proportional representation. He translated that ideology into judicial rulings beginning in 2018 with Abbott v Perez, which made it harder to prove racial gerrymandering. In 2021's Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, he weakened the same voting rights provision destroyed this week. And in 2024's Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, he gave states presumptive good faith in cases where they claimed partisan, not racial, motives for diluting minority voting power.
Roberts took a different path but arrived at the same destination. In 1981, as a Reagan Justice Department official, he authored 25 memos arguing that voting rights laws should require proof of discriminatory intent, not just discriminatory effect. Congress rejected that argument then, voting overwhelmingly to protect voting rights regardless of intent.
When Roberts joined the bench, he reopened the fight. His 2013 Shelby County v Holder ruling gutted federal oversight of southern voting changes, claiming "our country has changed." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg responded that if the country had changed, it was precisely because federal oversight worked. She compared removing the safeguard to "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
The rain Ginsburg predicted came immediately. Southern states, particularly Texas, rushed to change electoral maps and voting procedures in ways that disadvantaged minorities.
Roberts executed a strategic maneuver in 2023 with Allen v Milligan, a ruling that appeared to reaffirm voting rights protections. Yet buried in that decision was a single sentence: the ruling did not "diminish or disregard the concern" that voting rights protections "may impermissibly elevate race." That concern became this week's majority opinion.
The assault on voting rights runs counter to Congress, which has reaffirmed the Voting Rights Act overwhelmingly multiple times. It also contradicts Roberts' own precedent from just three years ago. During his 2005 confirmation hearing, Senator Ted Kennedy warned that Roberts appeared "to undo the progress that so many people had fought for and died for in this country."
Kagan's dissent concluded that minority voters are now "left virtually unprotected" and that "if other states follow Louisiana's lead, minority representation in government institutions will sharply decline."
Author James Rodriguez: "Two justices with a 40-year obsession have finally achieved what they couldn't win in the halls of Congress, and they did it by inverting the Constitution's most fundamental protections."
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