{"id":27847,"date":"2026-05-12T21:32:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T21:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/27847\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T21:32:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T21:32:21","slug":"the-supreme-court-just-made-its-awful-voting-rights-decision-so-much-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/27847\/","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court just made its awful voting rights decision so much worse."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for\u00a0Executive Dysfunction<\/a>, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law\u2014or how the law is pushing back. You\u2019ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate\u2019s Jurisprudence team.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court made its attack on the Voting Rights Act even worse on Monday through a shadow docket order<\/a> that significantly expands the invitation to gerrymander racial minorities out of power that the court extended just 12 days earlier in Louisiana v. Callais<\/a>. By a 6\u20133 vote, the Republican-appointed supermajority effectively overturned the court\u2019s 2023 decision<\/a> against Alabama\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019s revival of Jim Crow\u2013style disenfranchisement.<\/p>\n

SCOTUS rushed out Monday\u2019s decision on an expedited basis, presumably so Alabama would have enough time to enact its new gerrymander before this year\u2019s midterm elections. (The state\u2019s 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\u2019 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<\/a> 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\u2019s Allen v. Milligan<\/a>, agreeing that the VRA required fairer representation for Alabama\u2019s racial minorities.<\/p>\n

Alabama, however, refused to comply with that order. So the lower court imposed its own map featuring two districts where Black voters had a real shot at choosing their representative. The court also found<\/a> that, in defying its previous mandate, the Alabama Legislature had engaged in intentional racial discrimination, violating the 14th Amendment\u2019s equal protection clause in addition to the VRA. Up until Monday, this decision had prevented the Legislature from joining the former Confederate states now racing to eliminate Black representation from their congressional delegations. Alabama Republicans pressed the district court to lift its bar, but it refused. So they filed an emergency request at the Supreme Court asking permission to re-gerrymander Black communities in light of Callais.<\/p>\n

SCOTUS should not have granted this request, if only because it had more or less promised in Callais that it wouldn\u2019t take such a radical step. Justice Samuel Alito\u2019s majority opinion took pains to clarify that the court was not reversing Allen v. Milligan, stating flatly: \u201cWe have not overruled Allen.\u201d But as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent on Monday, this very case is Allen. So \u201cif Allen is good law anywhere, then it must be good law here.\u201d Why, then, did the supermajority throw away the district court\u2019s straightforward implementation of Allen if Callais didn\u2019t overrule it? There is no plausible reason. The real answer is that Callais did overturn Allen, but Alito lied about it to conceal his opinion\u2019s sweeping assault on precedent, including one from just three years ago. That lie held for all of 12 days. Then, perhaps when the supermajority thought fewer people were paying attention, it essentially admitted the lie by canning Allen over the shadow docket.<\/p>\n

But it gets worse. In Callais, Alito also promised that he was not diminishing the constitutional guarantee against \u201cpresent-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting.\u201d These safeguards, he wrote, were untouched by the decision, and would continue to protect racial minorities against attacks on their political representation. Well, so much for that: Here, the district court found that Alabama had engaged in this exact kind<\/a> of unconstitutional discrimination. It reached this conclusion in a 268-page opinion after holding an 11-day trial, considering testimony from 51 witnesses, and evaluating 790 exhibits. The record from this trial, as Sotomayor pointed out, is quite damning. For instance, legislators \u201cexalted\u201d the state\u2019s \u201cwhite community,\u201d asserting that this population shared deep \u201ccultural and economic ties\u201d that required giving them control over congressional districts. Yet these same legislators dismissed the notion that nonwhite residents of the Black Belt had any deep ties that counseled against gerrymandering these communities into oblivion.<\/p>\n

This finding of intentional racism was an integral part of the district court\u2019s decision to strike down Alabama\u2019s plan and replace it with a fair map. And Alito avowed that Callais did not unsettle the constitutional prohibition against maps that \u201cset out to prevent the election of candidates preferred by minority voters.\u201d If that were true, SCOTUS should not\u2014and could not\u2014have any grounds to toss out the district court\u2019s decision. But it did so anyway. Why?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Shirin Ali
\n Why Democrats Stand No Chance in the Gerrymandering Wars
\n Read More\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

We get no explanation from the unsigned shadow docket order. Again, the best answer we can postulate is the most cynical one: Alito was lying in Callais. The Supreme Court will simply ignore ample evidence that Republican gerrymanders \u201cset out\u201d to discriminate against Black voters. It will maintain an unrebuttable presumption of white racial innocence<\/a> whenever white legislators willfully annihilate Black representation. The only kind of racism that the supermajority is willing to acknowledge is the kind that it claimed was afoot in Callais: discrimination against white voters by giving racial minorities too much political power.<\/p>\n

All of which leads to the court\u2019s final lie: its highly selective embrace of the Purcell principle to stop courts from altering voting laws on the eve of an election. In December, the Republican-appointed justices invoked this rule to preserve Texas\u2019 racial gerrymander, declaring<\/a> that it was too close to the election to change the map. At that point, the primary was still three months away; the candidate filing deadline hadn\u2019t even passed. When these same justices freed Alabama to draw a new map on Monday, the state\u2019s primary was eight days away. Alabamians had already been voting by mail for five weeks<\/a>. Still, SCOTUS rushed in at the eleventh hour to unsettle the status quo, an entirely gratuitous judicial intervention that\u2019s bound to provoke mass voter confusion as legislators scramble to redraw the congressional map. This chaos is exactly what the Republican-appointed justices say Purcell is meant to guard against<\/a>. The so-called principle magically appears when Republicans seek to lock in wins, then vanishes when Democrats need its protection.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Virginia Democrats Can Still Save Their Map. Republicans Already Showed Them How.
\n <\/a><\/p>\n


\n This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only<\/p>\n

Trump Is Right About Something for Once
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<\/p>\n

What if It Were Possible to Pay Taxes Without Funding War Crimes?
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In dissent, Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, faulted the supermajority for disregarding these rules \u201cto unleash chaos and to confuse voters.\u201d But her opinion sounds as exhausted as it is exasperated. How difficult it must be, day in and day out, to ring this alarm for the public: to call out the supermajority\u2019s malicious, hyperpartisan tinkering with election laws to help the GOP; its shameless rejection of Congress\u2019 constitutional authority; its inability to stand by its own word for more than a few days. This trio thought it had scored an enduring victory in Allen three years ago. Now it can only watch as Allen burns and the Alabama Legislature eliminates one or both<\/a> congressional districts currently held by Black representatives.<\/p>\n

The crowning irony is that this blitz on Black voting rights is being done in the name of preventing voter suppression on the basis of race. In Callais, Alito wrote that his tortured and parsimonious reading of the Voting Rights Act was required by the Reconstruction Amendments; requiring fair representation for racial minorities, he averred, would be a constitutional outrage, as it would compel \u201cracial considerations\u201d forbidden by the Constitution. In other words, enforcing the 14th and 15th amendments\u2019 guarantee of Black voting rights would impermissibly infringe on white voting rights. That Jim Crow logic sits at the heart of Callais. And it is no surprise that the decision has already broken free of the half-hearted restraints that Alito inserted to downplay its devastating impact on multiracial democracy.<\/p>\n

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