The Supreme Court Just Made Its Awful Voting Rights Decision So Much Worse

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The Supreme Court made its attack on the Voting Rights Act even worse on Monday through a shadow docket order that significantly expands the invitation to gerrymander racial minorities out of power that the court extended just 12 days earlier in Louisiana v. Callais. By a 6–3 vote, the Republican-appointed supermajority effectively overturned the court’s 2023 decision against Alabama’s illegal congressional map, allowing the state Legislature to oust both Black members of its congressional delegation by splintering Black communities into electoral irrelevance. This unreasoned decision betrays Callais’ assurances that the court would preserve legal safeguards against openly racist redistricting; it took the supermajority less than two weeks to break its word. The resulting calamity for Black representation will mark a new low in this court’s revival of Jim Crow–style disenfranchisement.

SCOTUS rushed out Monday’s decision on an expedited basis, presumably so Alabama would have enough time to enact its new gerrymander before this year’s midterm elections. (The state’s primaries were already well underway.) The order upends a long-running dispute between the state Legislature and its Black voters. In 2022, a three-judge district court found that the Legislature violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting racial minorities’ political power. Republican lawmakers had packed most of these voters into a single district, then spread the rest through majority-white districts to diminish their influence. The court, which included two Donald Trump appointees, ordered Alabama to create a second district in which Black voters could elect their preferred candidate. Against all odds, the Supreme Court affirmed this decision in 2023’s Allen v. Milligan, agreeing that the VRA required fairer representation for Alabama’s racial minorities.