Supreme Court on the verge of striking down Voting Rights Act

Great. Now the only losers are the voters.

 

As it has been over the last two decades, the conservative court has eroded gov for the people and shifted it more toward big donors, while restricting how people vote, greenlighting more unconstrained partisan gerrymandering, and essentially allowing those in power or with massive wealth to choose their voters.

This midterm redistricting fight is highlighting to the public how power is controlled and manipulated by politicians. When Democrats win back Congress, they will have more political momentum to push for new voting rights, and they better act on it. No one likes partisan gerrymandering except politicians in power and those with extreme wealth who care more about their power than democracy.

 

Same goes with the SUPER PACS. That crap needs abolished. You want to make it fair? Limit individual political donations to a certain amount, and give everyone an equal shot at fundraising their campaigns. Eliminate the million and billion dollar donors.

 

THE SUPREME COURT HAS INVENTED A RIGHT TO DISCRIMINATE
Alabama gambled on the Court’s partisanship, and won.

by Adam Serwer
June 5, 2026

This week, the Roberts Court made clear that when it comes to drawing congressional districts, Black voters have no rights that anyone is bound to respect. For years, Alabama, where a quarter of the population is Black, had defied federal court orders, including one reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself in 2023, to create a second majority- or plurality-Black congressional district. Alabama’s reasoning for not doing so was simple: Its Republican legislators didn’t want to, and they didn’t believe that the Roberts Court would make them. “The Supreme Court ruling was 5–4,” State House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said about the 2023 decision. “So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.”

The state was making a gamble that the Roberts Court was more partisan than sincere. And it paid off: On Tuesday, the Court allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that diminishes Black voting power to the advantage of Republicans. For all the Court’s pretenses—all of its insistence on the rule of law, precedent, and good faith—many critics and supporters of the Roberts Court see the institution as an appendage of the Republican Party. The only thing that distinguishes the critics from the supporters is whether they think that is a thing.

“Alabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court’s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the Court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.”

The majority opinion was unsigned. In it, the judges argued that the lower court had “failed to follow our instruction” in ordering the creation of the new district. This was a reference to the April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito announced that “race and politics are so intertwined” that there are almost no circumstances under which the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting actually applies.

The Court’s ruling amounts to a total inversion of the Civil War amendments, which make no such exceptions for racial discrimination in the name of partisanship. Indeed, as I have written before, that would have made absolutely no sense at the time the amendments were adopted, when white-supremacist Democrats were disenfranchising Black Republicans. Race and partisanship were even more intertwined then than they are today, given that the Democrats were then the party of the defeated Confederates. If the Fifteenth Amendment did not bar partisan-motivated disenfranchisement, the amendment would not have changed anything at all. Indeed, the entire purpose of the amendments was to ensure that Black people could use the ballot as a means of self-defense against politicians who would deny them their basic, fundamental constitutional rights if they did not have to answer to them as a political constituency. The Roberts Court has thus rewritten the Civil War amendments to include a constitutional right to discriminate against Black people.”

This is a racist absurdity in addition to being an impossible read of the Constitution, which is perhaps why the Roberts Court has buried it under so many layers of obfuscation. The Court has invented a right to discriminate—as long as you provide a political pretext—that not only does not exist in the Constitution, but is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution.

The absurdities continue. According to the majority, anyone alleging that a map is discriminatory must provide an alternative map that provides the same outcome: The plaintiff’s map “must meet all the State’s legitimate districting objectives’ ‘just as well’ as the State’s own map,” the opinion reads. In this case, that “legitimate” objective is the creation of safe Republican districts. So the burden is on the victims of intentional discrimination to make sure that the people discriminating against them get what they want anyway.

This logic would not have barred any of the Jim Crow voting devices that the Roberts Court frequently congratulates itself and the nation for overcoming. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist Democrats imposed superficially race-neutral requirements such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The approach taken by Alito and the Roberts Court would have found all of these measures constitutional.

Frederick Douglass wrote that “the elective franchise” was “the one great power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to any class is delusive if not impossible.” The purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment was to ensure that Black voters could not again be denied their freedoms so that politicians did not have to heed their objections, to provide what Douglass called a “wall of fire for his protection.” But the Constitution has few defenses against a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.

Excerpt From The Atlantic
Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.