The Voting Rights Act Is Dead: What Happens Now?

Welcome back to our crash course in the U.S. Constitution — everything you need to know to better debate those aunts and uncles of yours on Facebook, without the law school price or the weird professors. The law was meant to be understood by the people. This series is here to prove it. With a plethora of parenting analogies to help.

Today’s issue: The Voting Rights Act Is Dead: What Happens Now?

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💡As always, paid subscribers can find the embedded audio voiceover below the “Part 1” header of this issue.

For sixty years the Voting Rights Act has been one of the central achievements of American democracy. It was not a decorative statute. It was not a civic aspiration mounted in the hallway next to a faded school portrait. It was a hard-earned intervention against a long and deliberate history of states manipulating election rules to decide not merely who won office, but who meaningfully belonged to the political community in the first place.

The genius of the VRA was that it understood something obvious to anyone who has ever parented more than one child: formal equality and actual fairness are not the same thing. You can give every kid “the same chance” to pick dessert after secretly letting one kid hide all the spoons. You can say every voter has a ballot while drawing districts that make some communities’ ballots functionally meaningless. The Voting Rights Act was Congress saying that democracy cannot survive on technical access alone — it cannot let you hide the spoons. The right to vote must include a meaningful opportunity to elect representatives of one’s choice.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais does not formally repeal that promise. And yet, you’ll notice I referred to the VRA with “was” and not “is.”

That’s because it does something more subtle and, in some ways, more consequential. It makes the promise harder to enforce. It pushes Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the statute’s most important remaining nationwide protection against minority vote dilution, closer to a regime where plaintiffs must show not only that minority voters have been politically weakened, but that the state did so for the legally forbidden reason rather than under the increasingly protective label of partisan advantage.

That distinction may sound narrow. It is not. In much of the country, especially in the South, race and party are deeply intertwined. So when a legislature redraws a map that weakens Black voters, Latino voters, or other minority communities, the state can often say: we were not targeting race, we were targeting Democrats. And under the Court’s current doctrine, that answer may be enough to move the case from the realm of racial discrimination into the safer harbor of partisan hardball. Which is wild.

This is the post-Callais world. The Voting Rights Act still exists, but the legal terrain beneath it has shifted. The question is no longer simply whether minority voters have been denied an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. The question is whether courts will recognize that harm when it arrives dressed in partisan clothing, carrying a spreadsheet, and insisting it is just here to optimize the map.

Republican officials have understood the invitation. Across multiple states, they are moving to revisit districts that were once drawn or defended under the Voting Rights Act. The goal is not hidden. It is to convert a Supreme Court decision about race-conscious districting into a broader opportunity to dismantle minority-opportunity districts, protect Republican incumbents, and reshape the House map before the next election. The legal vocabulary is constitutional compliance. The political translation is power.

That is why this moment deserves more than the usual redistricting shrug. This is not merely another round of partisan mapmaking, annoying but familiar, like finding a melted crayon in the cupholder. It is a test of whether one of the great civil rights laws of the twentieth century can still do the work it was built to do in the twenty-first: not just preserve the appearance of voting rights, but protect their substance, and in the process, our constitutional system..

So today in constitutional law, let’s examine the state of the Voting Rights Act: what it’s been, what the recent decision changed, how it’s been implemented, and where we go from here.

(Full audio narration by me, as well as the full text, available for paid subscribers. These lessons take hours to put together, so we’d love to have you on the journey.)