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The Supreme Court’s Death Blow Against Voting Rights Is the Culmination of John Roberts’s 50-Year Crusade

Beginning with his first job in the Reagan Justice Department, the chief justice has been hell-bent on dismantling the Voting Rights Act.

US Supreme Court Justice John Roberts at Donald Trump’s 2025 address to both chambers of Congress.

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court essentially eviscerated the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in Callais v. Louisiana. The 6–3 party-line decision effectively ends any protection against racial gerrymandering and vote dilution, and opens the doors to redistricting across the South that will likely decimate Black and Latino representation in Congress, as well as state legislatures and municipal governments. 

The central question in this case has a long history—and it begins with John Roberts’s very first days in Washington, DC, as a young aide in Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice.

When Roberts first arrived at the DOJ in 1981, fresh off a clerkship for William Rehnquist at the Supreme Court, he was assigned two important portfolios: prepping Sandra Day O’Connor for her confirmation hearings before Congress, and drastically curbing voting rights.

O’Connor sailed through the Senate. The VRA would be more contentious: A 1980 Supreme Court decision in Mobile v. Alabama had required plaintiffs pursuing a Section 2 claim to prove that lawmakers had racial intent. That’s difficult to demonstrate, and brought nearly all Section 2 litigation to a halt.

Civil rights groups, Democrats, and moderate Republicans wanted to use the VRA reauthorization to clarify that Section 2 of the VRA prohibited election laws and procedures that had a racially discriminatory effect, not just those passed with clear racially discriminatory intent.

Congress intended to remedy all racially discriminatory effects. John Roberts had a different idea.

The Reagan administration was divided. Moderate Reaganites did not want to battle over something popular and historic. But ideological conservatives within the DOJ were spoiling for the fight. They were content to extend the act, just so long as it was impossible to use. Roberts led the way.

Roberts’s papers from this era, housed at the National Archives, show his determination and dedication. They include memos and talking points, draft op-eds, scripted answers for bosses to deliver in meetings and before Congress, and presentations for senators and Hill staff. His files show how Roberts devised the messaging strategies that made it possible for the administration to claim that it supported reauthorization, while actually helping neuter the VRA—a skill he would go on to master as chief justice.

Before Congress two decades later, however, Roberts obscured this role. When Roberts was asked in his confirmation hearings by Democratic Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin why he then “want[ed] to make Section 2 cases so difficult to prove,” he distorted the 1982 political debate, rewrote its history, and downplayed his own leadership. One could even make the case that he misled Congress under oath.

“Senator,” Roberts replied, “you keep referring to what I supported and what I wanted to do. I was a 26-year-old staff lawyer. It was my first job as a lawyer after my clerkships. I was not shaping administration policy. The administration policy was shaped by the attorney general on whose staff I served. It was the policy of President Reagan. It was to extend the Voting Rights Act without change for the longest period in history at that point, and it was my job to promote the attorney general’s view and the president’s view on that issue. And that’s what I was doing.”

But it was not the policy of President Reagan. It was not the president’s view. And as Roberts’s own papers would show, he was doing far more than that.

US Attorney General William French Smith might have been the figurehead. But as Michael Carvin, who worked alongside Roberts as part of a group of ideological warriors in the DOJ known as the “band of brothers,” told me: “Voting—that was John’s fight. Always John’s fight.… I do think our strong feelings about all this comes from the fact that we were dealing with these arguments in 1982 and 1983.”

Roberts started at the DOJ as a special assistant in the civil rights division on August 14, 1981. Voting rights became his focus. The DOJ was the hub of opposition to the effects test in section 2 of the VRA. Bruce Fein, a Roberts DOJ colleague, remembers Roberts as the architect. “He was intimately involved in that. Definitely, intimately involved,” he says. “John, more than anyone, was very familiar with the voting rights stuff.”

Roberts started from a difficult position. Before he arrived, the pragmatic White House aides who wanted to avoid the messiness of a voting rights fight appeared to hold the winning hand. A lopsided House vote embraced the effects test. And during the summer of 1981, Reagan moved toward that position. That August, the president told The Washington Star that he would back a 10-year reauthorization.

Roberts drove reconsideration of this policy at the highest level. That fall, when Reagan seemed convinced on the effects test, the DOJ pushed back, hard. After the White House released a November statement that Reagan would support whatever compromise Congress reached, Roberts and his boss, Attorney General Smith, fumed. Smith demanded a meeting with Reagan. Roberts armed him with talking points. Reagan embraced two of Smith’s proposals: maintaining the intent standard, and making it easier for Southern localities to escape preclearance–the provision under the VRA mandating that districts with a history of racial discrimination submit planned maps to the DOJ for certification.

Reagan now........

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