Roberts Court Refuses to Stop Nullifying the Voting Rights Act
By 
You’d think they’d respect our fundraiser, but:
On Tuesday evening, in an unsigned shadow-docket order, the Supreme Court awarded Alabama a massive victory in its long-running campaign to crush Black residents’ political representation. Under the guise of soberly reinstating Alabama’s elections as usual, and over the dissent of the three liberal justices, the Republican-appointed supermajority halted the latest in a lengthy line of judicial efforts to end blatant discrimination by the state Legislature against its own Black voters. The high court thus rammed into place a 2023 map that transforms a diverse, Democratic congressional district into an overwhelmingly white, Republican one by ruthlessly carving up Black communities into electoral oblivion. This map has been deemed unlawful multiple times for intentionally discriminating against voters on the basis of race, and yet SCOTUS has now ensured that it will be the operative map for Alabama’s midterms. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her 14-page dissent against the brief, bloodless order, the court’s “unconscionable” intervention “disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”
Although the supermajority described its handiwork as a straightforward application of April’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Tuesday’s decision dramatically expands the scope of that ruling. It is not a mere aftershock from Callais but a separate earthquake of the same or perhaps even greater magnitude. Following years of twists and turns in the legal system, this case has become the vehicle by which the court’s conservative supermajority not only applies its own brand-new “updates” to Section 2 of the storied Voting Rights Act of 1965 but also sweeps what remains of constitutional protections against discriminatory voting practices out the back door. It commits these crimes in an unsigned, blithely dismissive order that lacks any substantive reasoning, as it pretends to be honoring some jurisprudential lodestar it celebrates as “our colorblind Constitution.”
John Roberts’s “colorblind Constitution”:
black people electing black people to congress in districts where they form a plurality or majority? potentially invidious racial discrimination. the only way to escape constitutional scrutiny is to elect a white conservative, then we know dr. king's dream of colorblindness has been achieved— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) 5:34 AM · Jun 3, 2026
Back to our original programming:
As we predicted after the court delivered the shock wave that was Callais, it was not just the remains of the VRA or the decades of precedent enforcing it that the court had jettisoned that day. It was the ability of racial minorities to ever succeed in challenging a redistricting plan as unlawfully racist. Tuesday’s order makes it painfully clear that Callais’ new test for rooting out intentionally discriminatory maps can never be satisfied by future challengers. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in that case had insisted that SCOTUS was altering only the act’s specific protections against vote dilution and that this would not affect the Constitution’s larger prohibitions against racially discriminatory redistricting. Yet now, without any justification, the supermajority has imported Callais’ jury-rigged standards into the constitutional rules against racial gerrymandering. It has dismissed the importance of Alabama’s racially polarized voting as simple partisan preference. And it has scolded the lower court for failing to demand an “alternative map” from the plaintiffs that would accomplish the state’s partisan goals without diminishing Black representation.
Oh, and does anyone remember the PURCELL PRINCIPLE?
But beyond what the court did—on the sly, in an unintelligible order with no acknowledgment of the anticipated harms to minority voters—sits the matter of how the court did it: by guaranteeing confusion and chaos while green-lighting a new map in a looming election contest, under the guise of adhering to a rule against injecting confusion into election contests. As Sotomayor explains in dissent, the lower court’s injunction had preserved the status quo in Alabama, allowing the state to hold its imminent primary under the map that had been in place for years. By freezing that injunction, SCOTUS has unleashed havoc on those elections. Alabama will now race to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters to new districts in a matter of days. (The state had previously claimed that this process would take months.) It will hold separate elections for some voters based on how their districts have been tweaked at the eleventh hour. In some counties, a skeleton crew of three election officials will be forced to work around the clock to change tens of thousands of voter registrations.
For years, the conservative supermajority has insisted that federal courts adhere to the Purcell principle, a judge-created regulation against judges altering voting practices on the eve of an election. Now it has jettisoned that standard when a state proclaims a compelling interest in rushing through racist maps to help Republicans pick up a seat in Congress. In short, the court has created an irrefutable rule that lawmakers can modify election procedures immediately before an election if it advantages Republicans. It has layered this flagrantly partisan doctrine atop a virtually unrebuttable presumption that GOP legislatures always behave in good faith and never try to break the law. This presumption, Sotomayor points out, is especially inappropriate here, given that just three years ago, the Supreme Court itself ruled that Alabama must create the second diverse opportunity district, which it has now abolished, and the state adamantly refused to comply with that order. So, in addition to its many other sins, SCOTUS has just rewarded Alabama Republicans for defying its authority.
I note again that that majority has stopped even citing Purcell, know that everyone knows that it means that “it is never too late for a change to an election laws that benefits Republicans, and always too late for a change to election laws that benefits Democrats.” We are reaching depths of bad faith that is hard to fathom.
More on this later! But remember that donating to our fundraiser will make Sam Alito very angry: