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The Supreme Court had a field day this term mangling Congress’ laws. For a court that repeatedly claims to be deferential to the will of the legislature, it took nearly every opportunity to narrow, rewrite, or make ineffective a wide range of federal statutes. Slate has been covering this phenomenon all year, from the dangerous decision preventing lawsuits against the U.S. Postal Service for intentionally misdelivering mail, to its later disastrous opinions upending voting rights. And while there are dozens of topics on which the Supreme Court’s constitutional rulings are confounding and will take years to resolve, there are a few areas in which a future Congress—with the help of a willing president—can try to overturn the court’s statutory decisions as soon as it’s assembled. Here are the five statutes that most need saving.

1. The Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s deterrents to racial gerrymandering in Louisiana v. Callais. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion flips the VRA’s burden of proof upside down. The 6–3 ruling requires voters challenging a state’s maps to prove that its gerrymandering was based on race rather than politics, creating a new, impossible-to-meet standard in the American South. The reason for the court’s self-proclaimed “update” to the act was the laughable insistence that civil rights had improved so much that Southern minorities no longer needed the protection of the past. That assertion was immediately revealed to be incorrect, as Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida all gerrymandered their maps to remove majority-minority districts before the midterms.

Congress should reaffirm that the VRA was designed to preserve multiracial democracy, not undermine it. More specifically, a future Congress must amend Section 2 of the act to explicitly protect racial and racial-political-hybrid gerrymandering claims. These amendments would place the burden on state governments to justify that their maps do not discriminate against minority voters. In addition, the law should clarify that Southern states are not entitled to a “presumption of good faith,” a made-up judicial gloss conservative judges have placed over the VRA doctrine to whitewash the congressional motives of states like Texas and........

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