Alito: the Voting Rights Act has to go because enfranchising voters would interfere with the state’s ability to disenfranchise its voters

I am running behind today because my lecture topic for my American Democracy class today is…the Voting Rights Act, which required some revisions based on some recent events. I will have more imminently, but I did want to highlight one critical part of Kagan’s dissent. The majority’s holding is that Section 2’s prohibition on race discrimination in voting does not apply if the state can cite any race-neutral justification, including the desire to disempower the other political party. The result of this, as Kagan points out, is that Rucho is not merely sanctioning is mass disempowerment of voters but is being used to dismantle the most important civil rights legislation since Reconstruction:

This is an incredibly perverse outcome even by Roberts Court standards. And as Kagan concludes, the impact of the majority’s illogical and lawless opnion will be far-reaching:

You cannot have a more dispositive illustration of Trump being a symptom of the rot of Republican elites than the cause than the Roberts Court’s voting rights jurisprudence, one that does not reflect any constitutional or statutory provision but does reflect the contempt that Roberts has had for the VRA for his entire professional career.