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THE SUPREME COURT LEFT NO DOUBT: IT WILL GUT THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT  
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Elie Mystal
October 16, 2025
The Nation
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_ The ruling, when it comes, will be disastrous for Black voters and
for Democrats. _

A woman held a US flag outside the Supreme Court as the court weighed
the future of the Voting Rights Act on October 15, 2025., Eric Lee /
Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in _Louisiana v.
Callais_ [[link removed]], a
case about whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prevents white
people from overrepresenting themselves in Congress. Oral arguments
can sometimes sound like the justices are deliberating great and
technical points of law, but the outcome in this case was decided long
before the lawyers arrived at the courthouse. The six Republican
justices are going to declare the Voting Rights Act inert and allow
the dilution of Black voting rights through racist gerrymandering.
Oral arguments were largely an exercise of the Republicans justifying
their racist positions.

At issue were maps for congressional districts in Louisiana. The state
has six congressional districts. After the 2020 Census, the state
produced a map where five of those districts were majority white. But
Louisiana is only 56 percent white, and 31 percent Black. Simple math
should tell you that there should be at least two districts in
Louisiana that are majority-minority.

That said, if math is not your thing (and it never is for Republicans
when the math doesn’t result in their supremacy over others), then
the Voting Rights Act and the 15th Amendment should be. Section 2 of
the VRA allows the federal courts to intervene when a state
discriminates against the voting rights of Black people. Louisiana was
sued by the NAACP after the 2020 census, and a court ordered the state
to redraw its maps, producing two majority-minority districts.

A group of white plaintiffs in Louisiana then countersued the state
over its new, less racist maps, arguing (wait for it) that this
application of the VRA violated _their_ constitutional rights. The
white litigants were arguing that their _overrepresentation_ in
Congress is permissible and that attempts to use the VRA to stop them
is the real constitutional violation.

As I explained in my Supreme Court preview
[[link removed]], the fact that
the court agreed to hear this case at all is an indication of how the
Republicans intend to rule. _Louisiana v. Callais_ was first argued
in the last term, but the justices could not reach a decision and
scheduled a rare reargument for this term. The case is itself a carbon
copy of a 2023 case, called _Allen v. Milligan_
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that Alabama could be forced to draw a second majority-minority
district under the Voting Rights Act. The fact that the court was
unwilling to apply its own precedent in _Milligan_ to the case in
Louisiana tells you that the court does not want to uphold the VRA.

Oral arguments on Wednesday functionally removed all doubt. Chief
Justice John Roberts and alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, the
two justices who broke with their normal white supremacist positions
and voted to uphold the VRA in _Milligan_, were both eager to treat
the Louisiana case as a completely different thing. Roberts
essentially argued that, in _Milligan_, the state all but conceded
that it was in violation of the VRA, and asked the court to do away
with it, while in _Louisiana_, the state argued that it would still
be in compliance with the VRA even if it reduced minority
representation to one majority-minority district—an argument that,
if accepted, would render the VRA functionally meaningless. This is a
common peg for Roberts to hang his hat on. As long as litigants
aren’t coming to his court openly saying, “I want to do some
racism,” Roberts loves to pretend that racism doesn’t exist.

Roberts’s moral obtuseness here isn’t just annoying (though it is
that); it’s also a mischaracterization of the VRA. Section 2 of the
Voting Rights Act _does not require discriminatory intent_ in order
to work. To win, plaintiffs literally do not have to prove that a
state discriminated against Black people on purpose. Section 2 is
concerned only with discriminatory _outcomes_. So if a state produces
a map that discriminates against people trying to vote, that state is
in violation of the VRA, even if the state “doesn’t have a racist
bone in their body” or has “lots of Black friends” or whatever
else it claims.

It’s a point that the liberal justices returned to again and again
at oral arguments, which lasted over two and a half hours, but that
Roberts seemed to ignore.

The lawyer representing the state of Louisiana—Louisiana Solicitor
General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga—argued that Louisiana’s intent was
not to discriminate on the basis of race but to discriminate on the
basis of party. This argument is also Roberts’s fault. In 2019, in a
case called _Rucho v Common Cause_
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gerrymandering “nonjusticiable,” which has turned out to mean that
white state legislatures can discriminate against Black voting rights
as much as they want as long as they claim to be discriminating
against people who vote for Democrats. Section 2 of the Voting Rights
Act was supposed to be the last line of defense against that kind of
racism-by-another-name, because, again, the VRA is not concerned with
intent, just outcomes. But Roberts and the other Republicans seemed
poised to ignore that, and give Louisiana a license to discriminate.

Roberts flipping his position from _Milligan_ to _Louisiana_ would
be enough to give the racists the win, but the second Republican in
the _Milligan_ majority, Kavanaugh, also appears set to abandon his
position from just two years ago. Kavanaugh was fixated on what has
come to be my least favorite white argument in any hearing about race:
Surely racism has been solved by now. He wanted to know when we can
declare that Louisiana and all other states have solved their racism
problem sufficiently so that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is no
longer necessary, and he was disappointed when Janai Nelson, the head
of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, couldn’t give him a hard-and-fast
date for when racism will be solved.

Again, I hate this argument. White people enact racist policies, we
make laws to try to stop them from enacting racist policies, those
laws kinda, more or less, work sometimes, and then white people say,
“See, we’ve solved it. We don’t need the law anymore.” As Ruth
Bader Ginsburg once said, the Republican argument amounts to throwing
away your umbrella in a thunderstorm because you’re not wet yet.
Racism will be over when white folks stop doing it. And you’ll know
they’ve stopped doing it when we no longer have white lawsuits aimed
at overturning the laws meant to stop white folks from being racist!

In any event, while Roberts and Kavanaugh twisted themselves into
pretzels to go back on their previous rulings, the other
conservatives, who were all in the dissent in _Milligan_, reprised
their feigned abhorrence at considering race to counteract racism. The
best way I can describe the arguments from Justices Thomas, Alito,
Gorsuch, and Barrett is to say that they think it is OK for white
folks in Louisiana to use race to draw discriminatory maps, but it’s
not OK for Black folks to use race to draw inclusionary maps. As
always with these people: White makes right.

If you’re looking for a silver lining, I can at least report that
the white-people argument the plaintiffs were trying to
make—“inclusive maps violate our equal protection rights”—got
absolutely no play from the Supreme Court. The Republicans are going
to allow Louisiana to discriminate, but they’re not going to say
discrimination is _required_ by the 14th Amendment in order to make
white folks feel “more equal” than everybody else (at least,
they’re not going to say that in this case). The lawyer representing
the white plaintiffs, Eddie Greim
[[link removed]], was… I
believe the scientific term is “dog-walked” by the Democratic
justices. Usually, when one of their boys is getting humiliated by the
liberal women, one of the white guys on the court pipes up to throw
their brother a lifeline. But not this time. The Republicans remained
silent as Mr. Greim got all that was coming to him. He was only at the
podium for 15 minutes, but 15 minutes is a long time when you are
getting repeatedly run over by a bus.

Unfortunately, the fact that the white plaintiffs who brought the case
got stomped by the liberals will not matter one whit when it comes to
decision time. I believe Kavanaugh articulated what will be the
court’s eventual 6–3 holding. He essentially said that Section 2
of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional, but the application of
Section 2 to a map where the intent to discriminate cannot be shown is
unconstitutional. They’ll avoid the headline “Supreme Court
overturns the Voting Rights Act,” but they will neuter the VRA to
the point that it’s no longer allowed to function.

If that is indeed the decision that comes down from the Supreme Court
in June 2026, I’m sure Louisiana will try to redraw its
congressional maps to go back to only one majority-minority district
ahead of the 2026 midterms, netting Republicans an additional seat in
Congress. Some analysts believe
[[link removed]] that
this Supreme Court ruling could result in as many as 19 congressional
seats being shifted to the Republicans by means of racially
gerrymandering away Black voting power.

The question I’m always asked in these situations is, “OK so what
can the Democrats _do_ about this horrible Supreme Court ruling?”
At this point, my answer is basically, “I dunno, go back to 2021 and
expand the court when you had the chance, like I told you to do
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Leaving Republicans in charge of the court is and always has been an
existential threat to the Democratic Party, and cases like _Louisiana
v. Callais_ are the reason why. The Democratic Party cannot survive
the loss of Black voting rights, and so when the party refuses to
protect those voting rights when it can, the party is ensuring its
future defeat. We are now suffering the consequences of the
Democrats’ past inaction.

Given what has come to pass, the only real option for the Democrats is
to gerrymander the states they control
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the absolute maximum, hope that the Republicans in their hubris allow
there to be an election in 2028, hope that Republicans lose that
election, hope that Republicans don’t use the military to steal an
election they lost, and then use tiny Democratic majorities to
completely remake the electoral system and the Supreme Court.
There’s nothing I know about establishment Democrats that tells me
they have the will to do that, even if they are allowed to take power
again, but that’s the play.

The solution, if there is one, is political, not legal. “The law”
is of no more use here. The Republican Supreme Court is about to
overturn a Republican ruling the Republicans made only two years ago.
That alone should tell you that the law, as it is practiced by the
Supreme Court, is utterly useless. The Republican justices have the
power to do whatever they want. And what they want, today, is to flip
Congress in favor of Republicans.

I continue to live in fear of what they’ll want tomorrow.

_[xxxxxx moderator - also of interest: What Trump Means for John
Roberts's Legacy
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- Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court by Lincoln
Caplan
Harvard Magazine
October 8, 2025]_

_ELIE MYSTAL is The Nation’s justice correspondent and a columnist.
He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is
the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to
Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution
[[link removed]] and Bad Law: Ten
Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, both published by The New
Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie v.
U.S.” here [[link removed]]._

_Copyright c 2025 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
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* Supreme Court
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* Voting Rights Act
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* Louisiana
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* 15th amendment
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* 14th amendment
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* Gerrymandering
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* republicans
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* Black voters
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* Democrats
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