Supreme Court Prepares to End Voting Rights as We Know Them

Summary

Chief Justice John Roberts and other members of the Supreme Court arrive ahead of Donald Trump's 2025 inauguration. Melina Mara/Pool/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to hide what you are doing in Washington, announce it on a Friday evening in the heat of August. Better yet, in place of clarity, reference some pages in another document, so that people have to track that down and read it in order to grasp what you are telling them. That is precisely what the Supreme Court did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: The Republican-appointed justices have decided it is time to fully destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Republicans argue equal treatment of minority voters is actually discrimination against white voters. Sixty years ago, the Voting Rights Act ended the Jim Crow regime and transformed the country, finally, into a multiracial democracy—albeit an imperfect one. But, with the court’s quiet announcement it would return to a paused case, the justices are now preparing to take us back to a time when elected officials at all levels of government were white, and the rights of minorities were trampled. The court’s eventual decision will impact how political maps are drawn, and will certainly hasten the precipitous decline of American democracy. In its most recent term, the justices heard oral arguments in a redistricting case out of Louisiana. The state’s population is one-third Black, but after the 2020 census, the Louisiana legislature drew a Congressional map for its six seats with just one majority-Black district. After two courts found that this map violated the Voting Rights Act’s mandate that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, the legislature drew a new map with two Black-majority districts. That should have been the end of the saga, but a group of n...