Supreme Court Conservative Supermajority Deals Devastating Blow to Voting Rights Act, Enabling Racial Discrimination

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has delivered a crushing setback to the Voting Rights Act, stripping away critical safeguards designed to protect Black voters and other communities of color from discriminatory practices at the ballot box. In the case of Louisiana v. Callais, the Court upheld a Louisiana redistricting map that a lower court had ruled unconstitutional for violating the Voting Rights Act, further eroding the law’s power to prevent racial discrimination in voting.

David H. Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), condemned the ruling as part of a broader “judicial project to destroy the Voting Rights Act.” He pointed to previous landmark cases like Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. DNC, which similarly gutted the Act’s enforcement mechanisms. Together, these decisions have left the nation’s most vital legal tool for protecting a multiracial democracy hollowed out and ineffective.

The majority opinion, penned by Justice Samuel Alito, flagrantly ignores both the text and history of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. Alito’s race-blind interpretation dismisses the constitutional reality that the Fifteenth Amendment was explicitly designed to eliminate racial discrimination in voting and empower Congress to enforce those protections robustly. Instead, Alito limits Congress’s authority and imposes an almost impossible burden on plaintiffs, requiring proof of intentional discrimination—a standard Congress explicitly rejected in 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act that targeted discriminatory results, not just intent.

By demanding proof of intentional racial discrimination, the Court’s ruling effectively guts one of the most critical provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to address the ongoing, systemic denial of equal political opportunities to communities of color. This ruling not only undermines congressional authority but also opens the door for new and subtler forms of voter suppression and racial gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court’s role is to uphold the Constitution’s text, history, and values. Instead, this decision abandons those principles, weakening the legal backbone of voting rights protections and threatening the very foundation of American democracy. As states are emboldened to draw discriminatory maps and enact policies that dilute the voting strength of minority communities, the promise of a truly multiracial democracy hangs in the balance.