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voting rights act
MAGA Supreme Court OKs GOP Overthrow of American Democracy
Disenfranching 40% of a state’s citizens cannot be reconciled with representative democracy.
May 14, 2026
Last week the Supreme Court gave a “two-fer” to white supremacists and proponents of Republican autocracy: First, six right-wing justices completed the erasure of the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act. Second, in the same case, Louisiana v. Callais, the right-winger judges approved of states shaping legislative districts that deny the opposing party any role in government.
In essence, the Supreme Court OK'd the destruction of Congress as an instrument of American democracy.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and ratified five years after the Civil War. The amendment confirmed—in principle—that African-American citizens have the right to vote and to have their votes count.
So said the Constitution. But for almost a century the former Confederate states negated African Americans’ right to vote.
The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The 15th Amendment also gave Congress the power to enforce its mandate. After years of struggle over civil rights—after peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham confronted snarling police dogs, mass arrests, and lethal bombing; after hundreds of nonviolent students worked for freedom in Mississippi in the face of murder, assaults, and the burning of Black churches; after peaceful marchers for voting rights returned to Selma after being clubbed by state troopers and ridden down by racist possemen—Congress tackled the white supremacist obstacles to African-American voting.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the myriad legal schemes that Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans and terminated the ploys used to deny African Americans a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
The outcome: Even as the segregationist white South moved to the Republican Party, African Americans gained substantial voting power and Black legislators were elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local government offices in meaningful numbers. The promise of the 15th Amendment, that all groups are entitled to a meaningful voting opportunity in a multiracial democracy, was mightily advanced.
But white supremacists and MAGA Republicans never accepted the new reality, so their right-wing agents on the Supreme Court finally throttled the Voting Rights Act for them. When the conservative justices threw out a congressional map that upheld Black voters’ right to have their votes count, they unleashed a new wave of state gerrymandering laws, enacted with extraordinary speed, and designed to make African-American voting futile.
To make things worse, the court justified its decision by affirming the power of states to deny meaningful representation to opposing party voters through gerrymandering.
As the right-wing justices explained, carving congressional districts for the purpose of denying representation to Black people may be forbidden (and good luck proving intent to discriminate, when Republican legislators don’t say so out loud). But doing precisely the same thing is fine when the stated purpose is denying representation to an opposing party’s voters.
Get that? The right-wingers of the United States Supreme Court say that judges must stand by and look, powerless to take action, if a state dominated by Republicans decides to manipulate congressional district maps to weaken or destroy the voting power of Democrats.
In practice it amounts to the same thing. The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.
The GOP’s ultimate goal is the same either way: a Congress under MAGA Republican control regardless of voters. A nation in which African-American political influence is crushed.
What does this look like?
After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature promptly redrew its congressional maps. They sliced up the one district held by a Black Democrat, with the intended outcome that all nine of Tennessee’s representatives will be Republican.
One-third of Tennessee citizens voted for Democrats in 2024. This year that one-third of the population—including the Black voters of Memphis—are to have zero representation in Congress.
South Carolina has begun the same process and anticipates a similar result. Republicans now hold 6 of 7 House seats, and intend to eliminate the one Democrat.
Forty percent of South Carolinians voted Democratic in 2024, and will have zero representation in Congress following redistricting. The one-quarter of South Carolina’s population that are Black will have no district in which their political voice will be heard.
US President Donald Trump has pressed for a similar outcome wherever Republicans control state government. In bright red Indiana (but 38% Democratic), Trump seeks to zero out Democratic representation in Congress.
GOP redistricting is only marginally less extreme elsewhere. In Missouri, for example, 38% of “Show me” state voters are blue, and their representation will be reduced from two to one of the state’s eight congressional seats (12%).
We have separate district elections for Congress so that the range of local communities, with their different racial and ethnic populations, different beliefs, interests, and occupations can have a fair opportunity for representatives of their choosing. Disenfranchisement by gerrymandering thwarts that purpose.
Even more disturbing, Trump’s gerrymandering offensive seeks to flout majority rule by creating a voter-proof Republican Congress.
American voters are increasingly seeing through the failures and the fakery of Donald Trump’s presidency, the broken promises, the corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. And voters see the price they are paying for Trump’s senseless grandiosity, from inflation to healthcare costs to measles, war, and climate change.
But through it all, congressional Republicans have remained Trump’s loyal, submissive toadies.
Voters will certainly make Republicans pay the price this fall. But Trump—with a big assist from MAGA Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—hopes to keep his hold on Congress, voters be damned. If a solid majority of voters cannot shake a would-be totalitarian’s hold on power, what will be left of our constitutional democracy?
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The Redistricting Wars Prove History Doesn't Move in Just One Direction
Abandoning the solemn commitment America made to guarantee equal representation regardless of race is a grave threat to our system of governance. And the fact that the Supreme Court has done it to enable partisan gamesmanship offends that legacy.
May 13, 2026
The late 19th century was a dismal time in American politics. Corruption ran rampant. Congress was governed by staunch partisan loyalties and nail-biting majorities. And redistricting, instead of being confined to after the census every 10 years, was a tool of manipulation and partisan hardball. “From 1872 to 1896,” a political scientist reports, “at least one state redrew its congressional districts each year.”
Of course, that era was marred by another phenomenon—one too familiar to us today. It saw a swift rollback in voting rights and representation for the newly freed Black population of the South. In 1875, after the Civil War and the adoption of the 15th Amendment, seven Black men served in the House, and one sat as a senator. Terrorism, political cowardice, and racial backlash ended Reconstruction. By 1902, Congress was once again all white.
That status quo largely held until the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law ushered in the multiracial democracy we have taken for granted.
Nearly two weeks ago, the Supreme Court supermajority finished its project of demolishing the law. The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais convulsed American politics. Since then, we have seen an ugly frenzy in Southern states, a brutal redrawing of district lines that could, as scholar Rick Hasen put it, “bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils.”
Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.
Since the ruling, Louisiana has gone back to the drawing board to erase one of its majority-Black districts, even though early voting had already begun in the primary election that was set for May 16. Preparations are underway in Alabama and Mississippi for redrawing their maps. Just last week, Florida passed a new map, which had been in motion in anticipation of a favorable Supreme Court ruling. In some states, as in Tennessee, Black voters could be left without any effective congressional representation.
Blue states, too, are scrambling to redraw maps to help their party, though their success remains to be seen. In a surprise ruling last week, a closely divided Virginia Supreme Court struck down the just-passed constitutional amendment that gave the legislature the power to redraw the state’s congressional map, which would have likely handed several seats to Democrats.
While gerrymandering remains unpopular among voters at large, among the activists whose votes tend to control primaries, party loyalty rules. In Indiana, for instance, several legislative challengers backed by President Donald Trump defeated most of the incumbents who refused to get on board with the Republican redistricting agenda.
Pundits who tally up the wins for each party may be missing the bigger point: Soon, state congressional delegations will begin to resemble the Electoral College—all red or all blue. Recall that Trump won 1 in every 3 votes cast in Massachusetts, while Kamala Harris won a similar share of the votes cast in Tennessee, yet both states will have monolithic party delegations.
What can be done?
The raw power grabs on display may be just the kind of thing to rouse voters to anger. Yes, midterm elections in November will turn on issues such as affordability and the war in Iran. But when people feel something being wrested away from them, they can fight back.
And Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.
It should enact legislation to make clear that American citizens can sue to protect their right to vote when it is infringed. Legislation should give voters of color a meaningful opportunity to prove intentional discrimination, and it should make sure that judges apply strict scrutiny to laws that impinge on the franchise.
And Congress should recognize the danger of an unelected Supreme Court—highly ideological, appointed for life—taking a hammer to laws that uphold political equality. This past month reinforces the need for court reform, including an 18-year term limit for justices.
Want more proof of the political role the court has assumed? Alabama took, as Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance put it, a “nanosecond” to rush to the justices for permission to gain the “benefit” of Callais, even though primary voting starts in a week. The justices quickly agreed, even though the state’s map had already been found intentionally racially discriminatory by a lower court, allowing the state to eliminate one of the two districts represented by Black lawmakers. This contravenes years of the high court’s assurances that rules should not change too close to an election. Calling balls and strikes? The fix seems to be in.
Alabama, of course, is where Selma is located. Its history is more complex than you might imagine. Here’s what I wrote in my book The Fight to Vote:
Alabama previously had one of the most democratically robust systems in the country, including universal male suffrage and a bar against gerrymandering. But its new Jim Crow constitution gave county registrars great discretion in barring African American voters. White men could vote without anyone attesting to their good character, but Black men required the recommendation of a white voter. As a result Black voting rates fell from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000 between 1900 and 1903.
History emphatically does not move only in one direction.
Abandoning the solemn commitment America made to guarantee equal representation regardless of race is a grave threat to our system of governance. And the fact that the Supreme Court has done it to enable partisan gamesmanship offends that legacy.
The Brennan Center was named after Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a leading force in the brief but celebrated period when the court actually moved to ensure equality in our election system. He authored the opinion in Baker v. Carr, which established the willingness of the court to enforce what would become the “one person, one vote” rule. He also wrote Thornburg v. Gingles, which set national standards so that voters of color could go to court and seek remedies when officials unfairly limited their opportunity to elect candidates to Congress. That American achievement is what the Supreme Court has so casually tossed away. It may be a long time before the court will once again play a positive role in our democracy.
The stakes are high. Brennan put it well: “The Constitution will endure as a vital charter of human liberty as long as there are those with the courage to defend it, the vision to interpret it, and the fidelity to live by it.”
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GOP Governor Landry Blasted for Throwing Out 45,000 Votes in Louisiana With a 'Smirk and a Chuckle’
"It’s not a big deal," Landry said after casually announcing that legally cast ballots were "discarded" after he suspended elections.
May 12, 2026
Louisiana's Republican Gov. Jeff Landry is facing criticism over his blasé admission that tens of thousands of Louisianans would have their legally cast ballots thrown out after he suspended the state's primary elections.
Landry signed an executive order suspending the state's May 16 and June 27 primaries immediately after the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in late April, which held that the state’s maps guaranteeing districts representing the state's Black residents constituted “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander."
The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais effectively destroyed Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and set the stage for the GOP to draw new districts that could totally wipe out the electoral power of Louisiana's Black population, which makes up about one-third of the state, and do the same across the country.
Declaring a "state of emergency," the governor announced that elections were suspended just as early voting was set to begin, leading many to conclude that the right-wing high court's ruling was timed to allow Republicans to maximize their power as they enter this year's midterms.
In an interview with "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, Landry was asked by anchor Cecilia Vega about the unprecedented decision to suspend the election and what would happen to the roughly 45,000 mail ballots cast before the order went into effect.
Landry contended that he had no choice but to suspend the elections because "we don't have a map that our voters can vote on" as a result of the court's ruling.
Vega noted that during times of much greater strife, including "during the Civil War, during two world wars, elections still went on."
"We'll have an election, and we're actually going to have an election on Election Day," Landry responded, in an apparent shot at those who cast their votes early.
"But voting was already happening," Vega said. "More than 45,000 ballots have been returned. What happens to those?"
Landry said, "Those ballots are discarded, and those voters will vote again in November." (Notably, Landry's order does not delay primary elections until November, but until July 15 or whenever the legislature enacts new maps.)
Vega responded with incredulity at the governor's casual acknowledgment that the state would simply throw out tens of thousands of legally cast votes.
“You say that like it’s not a big deal,” she said.
“Well, it’s not a big deal,” Landry responded. “It’s not my fault. If anyone has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court.”
The voting rights-focused news outlet Democracy Docket responded to Landry on social media: "It is a big deal to the 45,000 voters whose ballots you trashed. It’s also your fault."
They echoed the words of Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.), whose majority Black 6th congressional district in Baton Rouge is expected to be chopped up by the GOP, and who has joined a lawsuit with other candidates hoping to stop Landry's suspension of elections.
“The Supreme Court ruled that the map that you created, that this legislature created, and this governor signed, was illegal,” Fields said to Landry on Monday. "The Supreme Court did not say, ‘Throw away those ballots.’"
The decision to suspend Louisiana’s primary comes amid a multi-pronged assault on voting rights coming from the administration of President Donald Trump, who has himself repeatedly floated the idea of canceling elections and praised Landry for “moving so quickly” to block his constituents from voting.
But many were particularly shocked at Landry's apparent ho-hum attitude toward mass disenfranchisement.
Civil rights attorney and public defender Scott Hechinger marveled at the “governor of Louisiana throwing out 45,000 votes with a smug smirk and a chuckle.”
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