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The Supreme Court just handed down two surprisingly timid Voting Rights Act decisions

Why did a Court that hates the Voting Rights Act with the intensity of a thousand suns decide to stay its hand?

On Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to thrust another dagger into the nearly lifeless corpse of the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is arguably the most successful civil rights law in American history. Before the Roberts Court began to dismantle it, the VRA included a web of provisions intended to prevent states from denying anyone the right to vote because of their race. And the law started to dismantle Jim Crow voter suppression almost immediately after it took effect. Just two years after it became law, Black voter registration rates in Mississippi grew from 6.7 percent to 60 percent.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

But the Supreme Court’s Republican majority loathes this law. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a 2021 dissenting opinion, her Court “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act. As a young White House lawyer, future Chief Justice John Roberts unsuccessfully pushed then-President Ronald Reagan to veto a 1982 amendment to the VRA that the Court recently repealed in Louisiana v. Callais (2026).

After Callais, it is unclear whether the VRA has any remaining force whatsoever.

The two orders the Court handed down on Monday, meanwhile, concerned an alternative proposal to strangle the Voting Rights Act that Justice Neil Gorsuch floated in a concurring opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the same case where Kagan said that her Court has treated no law worse than the VRA. But the Monday orders neither endorsed Gorsuch’s theory nor rejected it — it merely asked two lower courts that previously considered this theory to consider it again.

The orders came in two cases, Turtle Mountain Band v. Howe, where the lower court backed Gorsuch’s attempt to further neutralize the VRA, and Board of Election Commissioners v. NAACP, where the lower court rejected Gorsuch’s attack on the law.

It’s unclear why this Supreme Court, which has been so relentlessly hostile toward the VRA, decided to punt this latest fight until some future date. It’s also unclear whether this fight still matters, as the Court has already bled the Voting Rights Act so deeply that the law may no longer actually do anything.

Still, as it appears there is still one more big legal dispute looming over this most diminished of federal laws, let’s take stock of just how much of the Voting Rights Act remains.

Does the Voting Rights Act still do anything at all?

Before the Republican justices started to dismantle the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the law used several mechanisms to ensure that voters of color were not locked out of power. As originally........

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