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After the Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais last Wednesday, effectively terminating decades of protections for minority voting rights, conservatives across the country cheered at the court’s blessing that they can gerrymander—across both racial and party lines—to their hearts’ content.

On Monday, the court allowed that decision to go into immediate effect so that Louisiana can cancel its already-begun primary and rewrite its maps to remove at least one district that had been drawn to allow Black Democrats to vote for their candidate of choice. In doing so, the court brushed off its longtime regulation that its decisions not go into full effect until 32 days after an opinion is finalized. This, rather than Callais itself, is what spurred Monday’s angry back-and-forth. Throughout the tense exchange in Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, they spar over when the clock of the rule of law should start and stop.

If the Callais decision itself didn’t make it clear enough, the subsequent order made it obvious just how much of a massive win for voter disenfranchisement efforts the Supreme Court has given the Republican Party in these upcoming midterms and beyond—and how largely that conservative-majority determined clock now looms over all of us. You don’t have to take our word for it. As Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, put it: “First Dobbs. Now Callais. Just Mississippi and Louisiana down here saving our country!” Dobbs was, of course, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, a conservative scheme for decades. And the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act was a similar effort; indeed, for the chief justice, it was a long-standing personal project, going back to the act’s amendment in 1982, when a young John Roberts lobbied against it as a lawyer in the Reagan White House. In some ways, the clock has been ticking for 44 years.

Despite the disrespect for precedent shown in both Dobbs and Callais, the cases represent two different ways of manipulating law, text, the role of Congress, and the remediation of harm. Dobbs showcases a radical adherence to “history” as a means of affording states the “right” to make abortion illegal. Callais showcases how some Republican appointees are willing to brutalize, even modernize, their own vaunted methodology of an originalism rooted in text and history to achieve results they favor politically. Callais, like its 2013 predecessor Shelby County v. Holder, subordinates text and history to state prerogatives. Perhaps more pointedly, the conflicting results reveal that in the minds of the court’s conservatives, some “rights” are enduring, forever worthy of protection, while others........

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