How the Supreme Court Demolished the Voting Rights Act

The Lede How the Supreme Court Demolished the Voting Rights Act For two decades, the conservative Justices worked to eliminate a bulwark of the civil-rights era.

Save this story Save this story Save this story For decades, the Supreme Court has steadily worked to transform the concept of discrimination based on race, from the civil-rights-era vision that the government has an obligation to remedy and prevent racial discrimination to a view that the legal and moral wrong is to see race at all and make any decisions in consideration of it. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in a 2007 ruling that disallowed a race-conscious measure to address de-facto desegregation in public schools, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” On Wednesday, the Court issued its long-awaited decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case about drawing electoral districts that embodied the clash between those two viewpoints. In Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the six-Justice majority, the Court’s idea of racial equality turned out to correspond to a downright dystopian vision of our electoral democracy. The consequence is that the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a landmark statute that was intended to insure racially equal electoral opportunity—has been read out of existence.

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