On Tuesday evening, in an unsigned shadow docket order, the Supreme Court awarded Alabama a massive victory in its longrunning campaign to crush Black residents’ political representation. Under the guise of soberly reinstating Alabama’s elections-as-usual, and over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the Republican-appointed supermajority halted the latest in a long line of judicial efforts to end blatant discrimination by the state legislature against its own Black voters. The high court thus rammed into place a 2023 map that transforms a diverse, Democratic congressional district into an overwhelmingly white, Republican one by ruthlessly carving up Black communities into electoral oblivion. This map has been deemed unlawful multiple times for intentionally discriminating against voters on the basis of race, and yet SCOTUS has now ensured that it will be the operative map for Alabama’s midterms. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her 14-page dissent to the brief, bloodless order, the court’s “unconscionable” intervention “disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”

Although the supermajority described its handiwork as a straightforward application of April’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Tuesday’s decision dramatically expands the scope of that ruling. It is not a mere aftershock from Callais, but a separate earthquake of the same or perhaps even greater magnitude. Following years of twists and turns in the courts, this case has become the vehicle by which the conservative supermajority on the court not only applies its own brand new “updates” to Section 2 of the storied Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also sweeps what remains of constitutional protections against discriminatory voting practices out the back door. It commits these crimes in an unsigned, blithely dismissive order that lacks any substantive reasoning, as it pretends to be honoring some jurisprudential lodestar it celebrates as “our colorblind Constitution.”

As we predicted when the court delivered the shockwave that was Callais, it was not just the remains of the VRA or the decades of precedent enforcing it that the court had........

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