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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court released its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, with the court ruling 6–3 along purely ideological lines, to all but end the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision will be a disaster for Black representation in elected bodies throughout the country, including in Congress, and a brutal blow to the very promise of a multiracial American democracy. After the decision came down, Janai Nelson, who argued the case at the Supreme Court on behalf of the soon-to-be-disenfranchised Louisiana voters, speaks with Dahlia Lithwick on a Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus; they discuss the stakes of the case and how Americans can still fight back. Nelson is the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund. A portion of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Election law expert Rick Hasen just described this as “one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the past century.” Can you describe the significance of this case and the stakes?

Janai Nelson: I said at oral argument that it would be catastrophic for the Supreme Court to in any way narrow or shrink Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. And it has done far more than that. It has effectively debilitated us from being able to enforce it in most contexts we’ve used it in in the past. This is a day of infamy for the court. It is a day of devastation for our democracy. And it is also a call to action for every American who hopes to continue to live in a functioning democracy, and one that is multiracial and multiethnic, and whose representatives reflect that.

Can we talk about the Louisiana map that’s at issue? African Americans make up approximately 33 percent of the state’s population. And despite this, the 2022 congressional map included one majority-Black district out of six. Can you talk about how we got to a place where the objection to mass disenfranchisement of Black voters in Louisiana turns into a conversation about how this is racism against white voters?

We get here, quite predictably, when we look at how race has been handled in this country from the very beginning. The VRA was........

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