The Court keeps its promise to the Confederacy (Louisiana v. Callais)

The Supreme Court today killed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining pillar, and the one Justice Roberts promised back in Shelby County would still be available. He of course joined today's destruction.

It did not have the courage to say so. In Louisiana v. Callais, six Republican-appointed Justices held that Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district — drawn to comply with a federal court order applying forty years of unbroken Section 2 precedent — is itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Alito wrote the opinion. He insists, on his penultimate page, that he hasn't required plaintiffs to prove discriminatory intent, and yet the opinion he just signed says liability under Section 2 attaches "only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred." Slip op. 23. Read that sentence twice. Then read the statute, which Congress wrote in 1982 to abolish the intent test the Court had imposed in Mobile v. Bolden: "No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color..." (emphasis added).

Justice Kagan, writing for herself, Sotomayor, and Jackson, called this what it is: "the latest chapter in the majority's now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act." She's right.

What Congress wrote, and why

In 1980, the Supreme Court held in City of Mobile v. Bolden that Section 2 reached only voting practices "motivated by a discriminatory purpose." 446 U.S. at 62. Justice Marshall, dissenting, wrote that under such a rule, "the right to vote provides the politically powerless with nothing more than the right to cast meaningless ballots." 446 U.S. at 104.

Congress agreed with Marshall and wrote a new Section 2. The Senate Judiciary Committee Report — S. Rep. No. 97-417 — explained, in language no honest reader can misunderstand:

"The Committee has concluded that this 'intent' test places an unacceptably difficult burden on plaintiffs. It diverts the judicial inquiry from the crucial question of whether minorities have equal access to the electoral process to a historical question of individual motives."

S. Rep. No. 97-417, at 36. The intent test, the Senate said, "asks the wrong question." Id. The amended statute "restores the legal standards, based on the controlling Supreme Court precedents, which applied in voting discrimination claims prior to the litigation involved in Mobile v. Bolden." Id. at 2. Senator Dole brokered the compromise. The Senate passed it 85-8. President Reagan — Republican Hero Ronald Reagan — signed it into law.

So the text Congress enacted, and which Alito today purports to interpret, prohibits any practice that "results in" a denial or abridgment of the vote, where members of a protected class "have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." 52 U.S.C. § 10301. "Results in." "Less opportunity." Not "motivated by." Not "intended to." Results. The intent doesn't matter at all.

Today's majority simply rewrote that. Alito's opinion declares that "the focus of §2 must be enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment's prohibition on intentional racial discrimination," and that liability attaches "only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred." Slip op. 23. He defends this revision in Part V by saying the dissent has it wrong — plaintiffs need only show what the 1982 amendment requires. They need only show "a strong inference of racial discrimination."

That is, of course, exactly what Bolden required and what Congress repudiated. Kagan caught the sleight of hand: "As I'll later explain, the majority now demands that vote-dilution plaintiffs muster proof of racially discriminatory motive. In that way, the decision echoes an earlier one of this Court, which also held that Section 2 should function as an intent test. See Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980). But Congress, as you'll soon see, amended Section 2 to reject that view." Dissent at 6.

The 1982 Senate Report describes the precise opinion the Supreme Court issued today and explains that Congress made it illegal. The majority pretends the report does not exist.

Roberts's broken promise

In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice Roberts told the country that gutting Section 5's preclearance regime was no big deal because Section 2 was still there. The exact words:

"Our decision in no way affects the permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting found in §2."

570 U.S. at 557. Section 2, Roberts reassured us, "applies nationwide, is permanent, and is not at issue in this case." Id. at 530. Things had changed, you see. "Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare." Id. at 547. We didn't need preclearance. We had Section 2.

Justice Ginsburg, in dissent, was not fooled: "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." 570 U.S. at 590. She predicted that "second-generation barriers" — racial gerrymandering, dilution schemes — would mutate to take preclearance's place, and that "history repeats itself."

Twelve years later, Roberts joined an opinion that revives the Bolden intent test he promised was off the table. He didn't even write a separate concurrence to acknowledge or explain away the contradiction, he just put his name on Alito's opinion. He wants everyone to know he was lying.

The Texas tell: forty-eight hours before Callais

Alito's headline defense — plaintiffs can still win Section 2 claims by proving intentional discrimination — was disproved by the Court itself, in writing, two days before he issued it.

On April 27, 2026, the Court summarily reversed a 160-page opinion of a three-judge panel of the Western District of Texas in Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens. The panel — led by Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee and former clerk for Greg Abbott — held a 9-day evidentiary hearing, examined 23 witnesses, reviewed thousands of exhibits, and watched hours of video showing the Governor of Texas and his legislators openly stating that they were redrawing the state's congressional map for the express purpose of dismantling minority "coalition districts." Governor Abbott had added redistricting to a special-session call within two days of receiving a letter from Trump's DOJ instructing him to do exactly that. The court found Abbott "explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race."

This is the smoking gun every voting-rights lawyer dreams about. On video. From the governor. About race. Reduced to findings of fact by a Trump-appointed federal judge after a trial.

The Supreme Court summarily reversed it. Six-three. No briefing on the merits. No oral argument. No opinion. The order, in its entirety, says the Court reverses "for the reasons set forth in" a five-paragraph stay order from December — a stay order that itself contained, as Steve Vladeck noted, "exactly two paragraphs of analysis, one of which was only about why Texas met the factors for a stay." Vladeck, who has spent years documenting the Court's shadow-docket abuse, called it "a novel extension of how the Supreme Court is using its rulings on the emergency docket as precedent — not for stare decisis purposes, but as the analytical foundation for its subsequent ruling on the merits." Chris Geidner at Law Dork was blunter: "the Supreme Court's Republican appointees on Monday let a five-paragraph shadow-docket ruling from December 2025 serve as the only 'reasons' for a summary reversal of a 160-page district court decision."

So when Alito tells you in Callais that Section 2 plaintiffs can still win if they prove intent, he is telling you that they have the right to bring the case the Court summarily threw out, on the merits, without explanation, less than 48 hours earlier. The Court is gaslighting in real time. It is performing the doctrine in one decision and burying it in the next, and counting on the fact that nobody outside the legal academy reads the orders list on a Monday.

Three years ago, this was settled law

Here is what makes the dishonesty so extraordinary. Three years ago, the Court considered exactly this question in Allen v. Milligan. Roberts wrote the opinion. He held — emphatically — that the Court "decline[s] to adopt an interpretation of §2 that would 'revise and reformulate the Gingles threshold inquiry that has been the baseline of [the Court's] §2 jurisprudence' for nearly forty years." 599 U.S. at __. He reminded everyone that "we have applied §2 to States' districting maps in an unbroken line of decisions stretching four decades." He invoked statutory stare decisis: "As Congress is undoubtedly aware of the Court's construction of §2 to apply to districting challenges, statutory stare decisis counsels staying the course until and unless Congress acts." He added, with a closing flourish: "That is not such a bad definition of stare decisis."

Today, the same Court — same Justices, same Chief Justice — adopts substantially the interpretation it just rejected, with Kavanaugh providing the swing vote he had quietly telegraphed in his Allen concurrence. As Kagan writes: "Yet today, the majority does 'revise and reformulate' . . . and destroy. It avails itself again of the tools used before to dismantle the Act: untenable readings of statutory text, made-up and impossible-to-meet evidentiary requirements, disregard for precedent, and disdain for congressional judgment." Dissent at 5.

You should remember this the next time a Republican Justice stands at a confirmation hearing and intones the word "stare decisis" — Kavanaugh on Casey ("a precedent on precedent"); Gorsuch on Roe ("a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court"); Barrett on stare decisis as a matter of judicial humility; Alito calling it "a fundamental part of our legal system." It is the verbal tic of a justice who needs your vote and intends to break his word.

The trap they built around minority voters

The genius — and I use the word the way you'd use it about a confidence scheme — of what the Court has done is the way each piece locks the next into place.

In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), Roberts held that federal courts cannot police partisan gerrymandering. Politics is non-justiciable. States can stack their maps openly for partisan advantage and the Constitution shrugs. Kagan dissented: "For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities. . . . Of all times to abandon the Court's duty to declare the law, this was not the one."

Then, in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), Alito invented a set of "guideposts" found nowhere in Section 2 and used them to reject vote-denial claims. There has not been a single successful Section 2 vote-denial claim since. Kagan's dissent there reads now like a warning shot: "What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America's greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. . . . The majority's opinion mostly inhabits a law-free zone."

Now, in Callais, the Court closes the trap. Rucho says: courts can't stop you from gerrymandering for partisan reasons. Callais says: if your gerrymander dilutes minority votes, you have a defense — just say it was partisan. Race and party are correlated, after all. As Adam Serwer put it: when parties dilute minority voters, "they'll say they're being partisan and not racist so they can get away with it." Kagan saw it coming and said it from the bench: "Today . . . the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders." Dissent at __. "It is not enough that Rucho has harmed the whole body politic. Now, that decision also becomes the cudgel to diminish the rightful voting influence of its minority citizens."

This is the actual operative rule after today: a state may dilute minority votes as long as it can produce a partisan pretext for doing so. And the Court — having declared in Rucho that it cannot evaluate partisan motives — will accept the pretext at face value.

The Cooper sleight of hand

Watch what Alito does with precedent. He cites Justice Kagan's own opinion in Cooper v. Harris, 581 U.S. 285 (2017), for the proposition that plaintiffs must "disentangle race from politics." Cooper indeed says that, at 308. It says it about something else entirely. Cooper was a Shaw v. Reno racial-gerrymandering case under the Equal Protection Clause — a case where plaintiffs were trying to prove that a State unconstitutionally used race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines. The "disentangle" requirement was a burden imposed on plaintiffs alleging racial classification, not on Section 2 vote-dilution plaintiffs alleging effects.

Alito takes language describing one cause of action and silently transposes it to another, hoping no one will check. Worse: footnote 1 of Cooper itself, which Kagan wrote, expressly held that using race as a proxy to achieve political ends — say, "to spread the Black population among several districts in an effort to protect Democratic incumbents" — is unconstitutional racial predominance. In Louisiana, the State openly admitted it drew District 6 the way it did to protect Republican incumbents Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise, and Julia Letlow — punishing Garret Graves, who had crossed Governor Landry. By the logic of Cooper's footnote 1, that is a Shaw violation against the Republican mapmakers — not a defense for them. The majority inverts Kagan's own opinion and uses it as a shield for exactly the conduct Kagan said it forbade.

The textual fraud

The statutory text, again: a violation occurs when minority voters "have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." 52 U.S.C. § 10301(b).

Alito's opinion concedes that "in isolation, 'opportunity' could refer to either a desired outcome or a chance to achieve that outcome." Slip op. 20. He then offers an analogy: "men under 6 feet tall have less opportunity to play in the NBA than those who stand at least 6 feet 7 inches." Id. Reader: this is the level of intellectual seriousness the Court of John Marshall now operates at. Section 2's protections, the majority instructs, are like the rights of people of differing heights to play professional basketball.

Nick Stephanopoulos has been writing this analysis for years: "It isn't textualism to follow statutory language only when doing so is congenial to one's ideological allies. It isn't textualism to flout statutory language by creating out of thin air extra-textual checks on a disfavored claim. And it isn't textualism to interpret the Voting Rights Act as one wishes it had been written, not as Congress actually wrote it." The "textualists" on this Court are textualists when the text gives them what they want, and Burger Court purposivists when it doesn't. Today's opinion contains essentially no engagement with what "results in" or "less opportunity" mean as a matter of ordinary English. Kagan's dissent, by contrast, returns to the words Congress actually wrote.

The long project

This decision is not an aberration. It is the consummation of a project John Roberts has worked on his entire adult life — since he was a 26-year-old Reagan Justice Department lawyer in 1981 writing memos against the very results test Congress was about to enact. He told us in Parents Involved that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." He wrote in LULAC v. Perry that the Voting Rights Act was "a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." He has now achieved what he set out to achieve.

Joseph Fishkin called this the "Second Redemption" — the echo of the post-Reconstruction era when the same Court that had been entrusted with the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments instead dismantled them. "In 1883, striking down a Reconstruction civil rights law, Justice Bradley wrote that slavery was over and Black people must 'cease[] to be the special favorite of the laws.' One hundred and thirty years later, striking down Second Reconstruction legislation, Justice Roberts wrote that 'Our country has changed.'" The line is direct. The Civil Rights Cases (1883), Plessy (1896), Giles v. Harris (1903), Shelby County (2013), Brnovich (2021), Callais (2026). Each generation of judicial Redemption looks back at the last and pretends it was building something different. It wasn't.

The Voting Rights Act was, in Justice Kagan's words, "born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers." John Lewis had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge so that the words "results in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote" would mean something. Lyndon Johnson stood before Congress eight days later and said, "There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. . . . There is only an American problem." He told the country: We shall overcome. Frederick Douglass said it more bluntly a century earlier: "Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot."

The Supreme Court today told all of them they were wrong. It told Congress, which reauthorized the Act 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House in 2006, that it does not get to decide what the Fifteenth Amendment requires. It told a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, who held a nine-day trial and wrote 160 pages of factual findings about a governor admitting on video that he was redistricting on the basis of race, that he was wrong too — and the Court could not be bothered to explain why.

Janai Nelson of the Legal Defense Fund warned at oral argument that "any further neutering" of the VRA would "resurrect the Fifteenth Amendment as a mere parchment promise." That is now where we are. The Fifteenth Amendment is parchment. Section 2 is a dead letter. The Court has filed its closing brief in the long argument over whether the United States meant what it said in 1870, in 1965, and in 1982. The verdict, six to three, is no.

Kagan ended her dissent without the customary courtesy of "respectfully," but I think more is needed. The majority knew exactly what it was doing. It lied about what the statute says. It lied about what its own precedents held. It lied about what Allen v. Milligan meant three years ago, what Shelby County meant thirteen years ago, and what Bolden meant forty-six years ago. It lied two days ago in Texas, and it lied again today in Louisiana, and it will lie again tomorrow about something else, because lying is now an ordinary tool of constitutional adjudication on the Roberts Court when the truth would interfere with the political project.