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If Wednesday’s disastrous Supreme Court opinion in Louisiana v. Callais reveals one thing, it’s this: Justice Samuel Alito is a coward. In that opinion, he’s either lying to himself or to the rest of us about the future of the Voting Rights Act. Callais essentially gutted what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Alito claims to have done no such thing. The question is why.

In Callais, Alito purported to overturn no precedent, claiming he was merely “updating” a framework that the Supreme Court constructed in the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles case to determine when a redistricting plan violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting minority representation. This follows his 2021 majority opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, where he purported to provide mere “guidelines” for determining when a state violates Section 2 in passing a law related to voting or voter registration.

In both cases, however, Justice Alito made it impossible for plaintiffs to win their cases, leaving Section 2 on the books, but essentially toothless. Since Brnovich, as I showed in a recent law review article, no plaintiffs have brought successful suits under Section 2 challenging a law alleged to suppress votes. Justice Elena Kagan’s exasperated dissent in Callais cited this research and rightly predicted the same fate for redistricting claims under Section 2: “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

Indeed, Justice Alito’s twin opinions in Brnovich and Callais engage in extreme overkill, providing multiple pathways by which a state or locality could defeat a Section 2 claim. In........

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