It started with a simple request, inasmuch as a simple request can upend constitutional principles and electoral freedoms across the country: President Trump demanding five more GOP-drawn districts in Texas. In response, two blue states, California and Virginia, redrew their congressional maps, adding more Democratic seats to create a stalemate in a newly emboldened, hyper-partisan gerrymandering war.

And then the Supreme Court’s conservative majority dropped a bombshell, obliterating the rationale for majority-minority congressional districts that have been the bedrock of the country’s efforts to right the wrongs of the past with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The casualties will be swift and unforgiving as red states across the South seek to capitalize on the ground they’ve been given. A quarter of the Congressional Black Caucus, as many as 19 Democratic seats, are predicted to see their districts redrawn and their electoral prospects dimmed, according to voter advocacy groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter. The same risks will likely impact ten percent of the Hispanic Caucus, which could be another 10 seats. The message from the Court is simple, too: time’s up for racial remedies.

The majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito does what SCOTUS does best—ignore the obvious reality of its partisan-fueled decision and cloak it in high aspirations. The conservative justices are fond of saying we live in a “color blind” America; indeed, Martin Luther King Jr said it first: Let us be measured by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. Except that’s not how the world works. And it’s certainly not how this decision works, either.

The argument as........

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