The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

The Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Prepare for maximum gerrymandering.

The Republican justices just abolished 40 years worth of law protecting against rigged maps.

Get yourself a man who loves you as much as Justice Samuel Alito loves partisan gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which was handed down on Wednesday, was expected to deal a mortal blow to a longstanding federal rule that guarantees Black and Latino voters a minimum level of representation in some states, and Alito’s majority opinion in Callais unquestionably deals such a blow.

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

But Alito, whose opinion was joined only by the Court’s Republicans, also goes much further. Callais is a cry of devotion to the idea that state lawmakers should be allowed to draw legislative maps that benefit their own political party, and that lock the opposing party out of power to the maximum extent possible.

Callais’s immediate effect is that it removes what was, until Wednesday morning, one of the few remaining federal legal checks on gerrymandering: the Voting Rights Act’s provision governing racial gerrymanders. Prior to Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act sometimes required states to draw additional legislative districts where a racial minority group is in the majority. Callais effectively neutralizes that provision. It does so in two ways.

First, Alito’s opinion effectively reinstates City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), which held that plaintiffs alleging that a state law violates the Voting Rights Act must show that the state legislature acted with “racially discriminatory motivation.” Congress repudiated Mobile in a 1982 amendment to the VRA, which clarified that a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” may violate federal law even if state lawmakers did not enact it with racist intent.

Though Alito denies that his opinion effectively repeals this 1982 law, his opinion rests on a fairly meaningless distinction. Though he claims that Callais “does not demand a finding of intentional discrimination,” he then writes that the VRA “imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” So the new rule is really the same as Mobile, albeit with the........

© Vox