The supreme court justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have made it their life’s work to unravel the Voting Rights Act and undo the most effective civil rights legislation in American history.

On Wednesday, they finished the job.

In a 6-3, party line decision in Callais v Louisiana, based on politics, not law, the US supreme court in effect erased the remaining provisions of section 2 of the VRA, which had protected minority voters against racial gerrymandering and vote dilution.

They invited Republican state legislatures to draw new congressional maps that will probably create a solid red south, the largest reduction in Black political representation since the death of Reconstruction – a loss of as many as 19 seats in the US House and nearly 200 state legislative seats nationwide – and dramatically remake the balance of power in favor of Republicans.

The court that began its assault on the VRA in 2013 by freezing its most important enforcement mechanism, while vowing that section 2 would be enough to catch all future violations, completed years of work to erode their own promise and gut the law’s important protections.

Then they congratulated themselves and declared the circumstances “cause for celebration”.

The reaction was certainly gleeful amongst Donald Trump’s strategists and advisers, who immediately understood the consequences the court feigned ignorance of: “If states are aggressive, we could see a healthy majority in the House perpetually,” wrote Brad Parscale on Twitter/X. In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn immediately called on state lawmakers to redraw the state’s one blue congressional district in Memphis, and there were similar calls in South Carolina. Louisiana Republicans moved to postpone 16 May primaries so they could draw a 6-0 Republican map, eliminating two seats currently held by Black Democrats. Florida and Mississippi had already begun the process of bleaching US House and state supreme court districts white in anticipation of this ruling.

But if the work of gutting multiracial democracy is just about to begin in earnest in state capitols across the south, Roberts, Alito and the Republican supermajority on the court can declare mission accomplished. For more than a dozen years, since ending the VRA’s key enforcement mechanism in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder, the Roberts court has slowly, patiently and now permanently worked to drain the VRA of its power and render it a dead letter.

This is not the work of a court doing law, under any stretch of the word. This is a court exercising raw political power, an unelected body with lifetime appointments doing grave harm to representative, multiracial democracy.

This court has in all material respects impaled one of the most important laws in US history. The nation’s highest judges have made........

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