The Last Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not die all at once, or by one means. It died through attrition: a Congress that was too sclerotic and polarized to defend one of its finest accomplishments, lawyers and academics who tolerated retreats on civil rights, a society that lapsed into the comfortable illusion that it had accomplished the work of the civil-rights movement. And it died through action: a series of blows from conservative justices ideologically hostile to the law’s aims.Last week’s decision in Callais v. Louisiana is the most devastating of those blows. The consequences are grave enough on their own terms. Callais will foreclose nearly all federal voting-rights claims aimed at ensuring minority political participation through fair districting. Over successive redistricting cycles, it is poised to collapse Black representation across the South in ways not seen since the end of Reconstruction.But to view Callais as merely the final hit in the Voting Rights Act’s destruction is to miss its deeper ambition. The bigger shift is that Callais also closes off the possibility that a future Congress could respond with new legislation combating racial discrimination in the electoral system. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the other Republican appointees, rests on an interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment that effectively bars Congress from remedying the very inequities Callais unleashes—inequities the amendment itself was designed to eradicate and prevent.Seen in this light, Callais is not merely an assault on a landmark statute, or just another step in the Court’s and America’s retreat from the multiracial democracy envisioned by the Constitution’s Reconstruction amendments. It is something more ambitious and insidious—a consolidation of judicial supremacy, achieved by turning those amendments against the congressional authority they were meant to confer. The decision does not only dismantle a statute; it hollows out Congress’s capacity to respon