04/29/2026
If you know me, you already know I am furious. I had steeled myself for this since cert was granted, and I have known it was coming since PICS v. SPS, 551 U.S. 701 (2007). SCOTUS just gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026). 6-3 by Alito. This is the broken legal reasoning, the white supremacy at its rotten core, and the "facially neutral" lie that has propped up Black voter suppression for over a century. It's long. Sorry, not sorry.
This broke down along ideological lines. Alito wrote. The same Alito who wrote Brnovich v. DNC, 594 U.S. 647 (2021), inventing a "guardrails" test to gut Section 2 vote-denial claims, and Dobbs v. Jackson, 597 U.S. 215 (2022). Roberts wrote PICS in 2007 declaring "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
That line was always the warning shot. It ignored that discrimination exists.
Kagan wrote for the liberal wing, calling it out. The majority "betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote." She called the ruling part of a "now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act." She is right. After Shelby County (2013) killed Section 5 preclearance, and Brnovich (2021) gutted Section 2 vote-denial claims, today finishes the job on vote dilution and solidifies a racist voting system.
Louisiana redrew its map after the 2020 census. The Middle District of Louisiana found in Robinson v. Ardoin, 605 F. Supp. 3d 759 (2022), that the original map likely violated Section 2 by packing Black voters into a single district. Louisiana, 30% Black, then drew SB8 with a second majority-Black district to comply. So-called "non-African-American voters" sued. The Trump administration jumped in to support them. SCOTUS just killed the only remedy a federal court ordered.
Despite that finding, the majority says Section 2 now "imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race." Kagan called it. Proof of "discriminatory motive" is "well-nigh impossible." Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 specifically to kill the intent test after Mobile v. Bolden. Today's majority resurrected the requirement Congress buried four decades ago.
How? Strict scrutiny is the trick.
The majority lists "only two compelling interests" that survive: prison safety and remediating "specific, identified instances" of past discrimination. It ignores that the original map WAS RACIST. VRA compliance doesn't make the cut now unless a Section 2 violation is proved under standards the same Court just made impossible. Closed loop, designed to fail. Strict scrutiny was sold as protective in Korematsu's wake. It now kills civil rights law.
This is the very architecture I wrote about 18 years ago in Swept Under the Rug: Integrating Critical Race Theory into the Legal Debate on the Use of Race, 6 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 673 (2008). The thesis was straightforward. Strict scrutiny is the doctrinal weapon used to strike down every meaningful race-conscious remedy while waving through facially neutral systems that crush non-whites. PICS proved it in 2007. Callais proves it again in 2026.
The lie at the center of all of Callais is "facially neutral." This is not neutral. It never was. Every map sits on top of generations of intentional government action that herded Black people into specific neighborhoods, then drew lines around them. The Court treats the resulting concentration as a fact of nature, like rivers and mountains. It is not nature. It is policy. Federal policy. State policy. Local policy. Documented in archives. It is white supremacy.
Federal redlining maps from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded Black neighborhoods "hazardous" and locked Black families out of mortgages for decades. Racial zoning was struck down in 1917, and immediately replaced by private restrictive covenants and "neutral" zoning that did the same work. "Urban renewal" bulldozed Black wards. Federal highway routing carved them up. Public housing was sited to reinforce segregation. None of it was neutral. And now the racism is being preserved.
I'm not done. States drew district lines around the segregation they had created and called it geography. Tuskegee is the textbook case. Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 (1960). The legislature redrew the city into a 28-sided figure that removed all but four or five of 400 Black voters and zero white voters. The bill was drafted by State Senator Sam Engelhardt, executive secretary of the White Citizens' Council. The Court called it what it was. Today's Court would call it permissible.
I'm still not done. It kept going long after Gomillion. Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980), upheld at-large city elections that had elected zero Black commissioners in a 35% Black city. Joaquin Avila, the Latino voting rights attorney who founded the National Voting Rights Advocacy Initiative at my alma mater, spent his entire career proving these "neutral" at-large systems were vote-dilution machines. Over 70 voting rights cases. Two argued at SCOTUS. A MacArthur fellowship for it.
Avila, may his memory be a blessing, won Gomez v. City of Watsonville, 863 F.2d 1407 (9th Cir. 1988), and drafted the California Voting Rights Act of 2001 because Section 2 was already getting strangled. His point was simple. At-large elections, multimember districts, packing, and cracking are not neutral when overlaid on segregated housing. They are the second floor of a house built on Jim Crow foundations. Today's Court pretends the foundation does not exist and condemns the repairs.
Critical race theorists named this decades ago. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ian Haney López. "Colorblind individualism" treats white-majority districts drawn by Republican legislatures as neutral politics, and Black-majority districts drawn to remedy documented dilution as suspect "racial gerrymanders." White as the unstated baseline. Black as the deviation requiring strict scrutiny. Same pattern in PICS. Same pattern in SFFA v. Harvard. Same pattern today.
Read what Alito did with politics. Because race and party preference now correlate, he says Black voters are just losing on partisanship, not race. BS. They are one and the same. Kagan calls that out. The correlation is "the result of a prior mistake by this Court," meaning Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019), which legalized this partisan gerrymandering. The Court engineered a doctrinal hole in 2019, and today's majority drove the entire VRA through it. This was the plan.
And the original sin gets a pass.
The Court calls historical evidence of intentional discrimination "decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems." Shelby County, 570 U.S. 529, 553 (2013), quoted again today at 35. That is gaslighting on a cosmic scale. Redlining ended on paper in 1968. Restrictive covenants "died" in 1948. Poll taxes "died" in 1964. The infrastructure (discriminatory lending, lack of polling places, residual effects) still runs our lives. Pretending otherwise is a lie.
Kagan's closer says it. The Voting Rights Act "was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers." She dissents from "this latest chapter in the majority's now-completed demolition" of it. The full opinion is at the link. Read the dissent in particular. It is a 50-plus page roadmap of what we have lost, how the majority misreads the statute and the history, and what we have to fight to rebuild.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf
Make no mistake about what this is. Six justices just told Black voters in Louisiana that the remedy for racism is itself unconstitutional discrimination, while the racist maps that produced the dilution remain presumptively fine, as long as no one said the quiet part out loud.
That is white supremacy.
The PICS warning shot in 2007 has become a kill shot in 2026. Vote every one of these racists out, expand the court, and boot white supremacists.
And I am exhausted that so many people do not see this.
