What the Destruction of the Voting Rights Act Means for Our Country’s Future

When I was growing up, it wasn’t controversial to learn in public school that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed minority representation. The legislation, signed into law by Lydon Johnson, has long been considered one of the bedrock achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. For decades, federal courts cited the Voting Rights Act when striking down onerous voting restrictions that have blocked access to the ballot as well as electoral maps that have gerrymandered away Black voters’ right to their collective voice.

But extremist Supreme Court justices have been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act for years now, and they seem poised to further hollow it out before the midterm elections. Last week, the Court heard arguments in Callais v. Louisiana, a case that hinges on whether lawmakers can use race as a factor when drawing district maps. The justices’ decision will have dramatic consequences for whether Democrats have a fair chance to win in the 2026 midterms. And, in profound ways, this case is about the re-entrenchment of white supremacy in this country.

First, some background context: Federal courts previously required Louisiana to redraw their district maps to include another majority Black congressional district to allow its Black citizens equal representation under the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana’s population is about one-third Black; that electoral map included only one majority Black congressional district. Then, some voters who identify as “non-African American” sued to get those maps thrown out, claiming that the new maps unfairly discriminated against them.

Nobody really seems sure who these “non-African American” plaintiffs are. The New York Times looked into it and could only turn up that one is a member of the Trumpettes, another protested against Covid shutdowns, another reportedly didn’t seem aware that he was part of the case. Through this effort, these semi-anonymous plaintiffs could deal another serious blow to our democracy.

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The Court’s conservative supermajority, and their benefactors, have been building toward this outcome. After megadonors and political strategists spent years –and millions of dollars –trying to undermine voting rights, in 2013, in the case Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court issued an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a long-time voting rights foe, saying that minority voters no longer experienced “blatant discrimination” and so significant portions of the Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously wrote in her dissent that the decision was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” That turned out to be the prescient interpretation. According to the Brennan Center, in the decade after Shelby, states passed nearly 100 restrictive voting laws–and that number has certainly increased since.

In several ways, all this reminds me of what happened with abortion rights. Since abortion was legalized nationwide in the 1970s, anti-abortion advocates had whittled away at the constitutional right to abortion via incremental state laws, winning a few key Supreme Court cases along the way. Those state restrictions, like many of these recently passed voter restrictions, were often complicated, arcane-seeming, and difficult to summarize both accurately and clearly in a short space, with ramifications that the public would largely not grasp until it was too late.

I reported on abortion for national magazines during the 2010s, a time when Republicans had swept into several statehouses with a major assist from the Citizens United decision that supercharged Republican and corporate strategists’ plan to target state legislatures. The deeper I got into that reporting, the more it resonated with me when experts on reproductive rights talked about how there were deep-pocketed, extremely committed forces whose ultimate goal was to enforce a Christian nationalist agenda within our government and broader society. In other words, those leaders wanted American civic life to be defined by allegiance to Christianity, usually a form of evangelical Christianity.

The notion that our country was on the brink of being taken over by people who believe that upholding a very specific form of Christianity should be, not an option in a free society, but the state-directed mandate for the American people, seemed perhaps a little paranoid to some people at the time. I received pushback during media interviews and in conversations with friends. But here we are. The ultra-conservative Supreme Court majority overturned Roe. Project 2025 calls for “a biblically based family,” an effective national abortion ban, and a federal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, among many other goals that discriminate against women and LGBTQ+ people. Within days of Trump taking office in January, federal workers were told to remove their pronouns from their emails. Etcetera. I understand why I couldn’t fully anticipate all of this, and why I don’t think my friends could, either.

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The time for having such limited imaginations is over, unfortunately. It’s probably been over for a very long time, and definitely since during the first Trump administration the government began taking immigrant children from their parents, as many as 1,300 of whom had not been reunited six years later. It’s been over since JD Vance spread vicious lies about Haitians on stage during the vice presidential debate and a few weeks later the Trump campaign held a rally at Madison Square Garden where a comedian made derogatory comments about Puerto Ricans, Black people, Jewish people, Palestinians, and Stephen Miller said, “America is for American and Americans only.” (and not two weeks later, a higher share of Americans voted for the Trump/Vance ticket than had voted for Trump/Pence in 2016). It’s been over since the Trump administration issued an executive order defining teaching about race and gender in schools as “imprinting anti-American, subversive, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children,” since the Supreme Court declared affirmative action unconstitutional and racial profiling is legal, since Black Hawk helicopters were sent into a majority Black neighborhood in Chicago and the U.S. military zip-tied citizens and immigrants, including children, before arresting 37 people during that single operation.

Many Black writers and public figures have pointed out that tyranny is nothing new for the United States. The founding of this country was predicated on authoritarian violence. The blueprint for all of this was written years ago, when Black people were sold as chattel, during Reconstruction and Jim Crow. For The Intercept, Alain Stephens lays out the history of the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance of Civil Rights leaders, those very same people working to establish The Voting Rights Act. He adds that Black Americans have always been aware of the threat of government surveillance, repression, and violence, even when directed at others: “We know ‘them’ becomes ‘you’ sooner than you think.”

In myriad ways, we’re watching our federal government adopt (or re-adopt) white supremacy as a governing principle. We must see this for what it is and take it seriously.