‘A day of loss for our democracy’: civil rights groups slam supreme court ruling that weakens key part of Voting Rights Act
Outrage as supreme court deals major blow to landmark voting law.
Today, the supreme court’s conservative majority struck down a major element of the Voting Rights Act which protects against racial discrimination in redistricting, in a ruling that paves the way for aggressive gerrymandering in states across the nation that could affect elections for years to come.
As my colleague Sam Levine notes, at the heart of the case, Louisiana v Callais, was a question of how much lawmakers are allowed to consider race when they redraw districts to ensure that black voters are adequately represented.
In a 6-3 decision, split along partisan lines, the court struck down a majority-black congressional district in Louisiana, rendering ineffective section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining powerful provision of the 1965 civil rights law that prevents racial discrimination in voting. Section 2 has long been used to ensure minority voters are treated fairly in redistricting.
The ruling gives lawmakers permission to draw districting plans that weaken the influence of black and other minority voters. It comes as Donald Trump has pushed for red states to redraw their congressional maps in ways that would help Republicans win more seats in this year’s elections.
“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,” conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority opinion. “Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here. The state’s attempt to satisfy the middle district’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote the court had now accomplished a “demolition of the Voting Rights Act”.
Under the court’s new view of section 2, a state can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. In fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law.
Today’s decision renders section 2 all but a dead letter. The decision here is about Louisiana’s district 6. But so too it is about Louisiana’s district 2. And so too it is about the many other districts, particularly in the south, that in the last half-century have given minority citizens, and particularly African Americans, a meaningful political voice. After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long.
Reactions have poured in from lawmakers and civil rights groups, condemning the supreme court’s decision.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called the ruling “a devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act” and “a major setback for our nation”. The ruling is “a license for corrupt politicians who want to rig the system by silencing entire communities”, president Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “The Supreme Court betrayed Black voters, they betrayed America, and they betrayed our democracy.”
Former president Barack Obama said the ruling “effectively gut[s] a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act” and frees “state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities - so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias’”.
“This is a day of tremendous loss. It’s a day of loss for our democracy,” said Janai Nelson, who leads NAACP LDF and argued the case at the supreme court. “It’s a day of loss for critical protections for the right to vote that have served our multiracial democracy for over six decades. It’s a day of loss for Black voters in Louisiana who have counted on fair maps to allow them representation that they have been denied for their entire existence in that state.”
Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, called the ruling “a profound betrayal of the civil rights movement”. Today’s decision in Callais renders Section 2 moot as “it will be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce in the vast majority of cases,” she said.
Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi called the ruling a “new blow” against the “sacred right to vote”. “The consequences will be felt across the country: fewer voices heard, fewer communities represented and a democracy diminished,” she said.
Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said, the “awful” decision represented “another step towards resurrecting the Jim Crow south”. The ruling, he said, “opens the floodgates for states across the south to redraw their Congressional districts and make voters of color essentially invisible in our democracy”. The court, he said, was “trying to give Republicans a leg up, an illegitimate leg up, in future elections”.
His House counterpart, Hakeem Jeffries, called the decision “corrupt”. “Voter suppression is a way of life for Donald Trump and far right extremists on the Supreme Court,” he said. “Republicans know they cannot win a free and fair election in November and so they are desperate to rig it. We will never let them succeed.”
Georgia senator Reverend Raphael Warnock said the decision “further ravaged” the Voting Rights Act and left the country “at a crossroads where politicians are picking their voters”. “Clearly, we are straying further from the core voting principles that helped create the diverse body that people see representing them today,” he said. “We must restore the Voting Rights Act and ban gerrymandering. Our democracy is on the line.”
Representative Troy Carter, whose predominately black congressional district encompasses New Orleans, said “the consequences of the high court’s decision will be “immediate and severe” and that Louisiana’s two majority-black congressional districts are now at risk of being dismantled. “Without the protections of the Voting Rights Act, there is no evidence to suggest that Black voters in our state will be able to elect candidates of their choice,” he said.
New Orleans mayor Helena Moreno, a Democrat who represents the largest city in Louisiana’s other predominantly black congressional district, said the supreme court’s ruling was “a step backward”. “Striking down a district that reflected diversity suppresses voices and weakens our democracy. We should be working to expand representation, not roll it back,” she said.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, executive director of Fair Fight Action, said the supreme court’s decision “guts” voting rights protection while “pretending to uphold it”. “It allows states, counties and cities to shield their discriminatory maps by claiming they are advancing their own partisan interests, ignoring that race and party are highly correlated in places across the country, particularly the south,” she said.
Black lawmakers face losing their seats after supreme court decision: ‘We’re going backwards’
Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures are at risk of losing their seats in Alabama’s Black congressional districts after ruling
The lawmakers who represent Alabama’s two Black congressional districts, who are now at risk of losing their seats after the supreme court effectively decimated the Voting Rights Act, said the decision sends the US “backwards”.
The 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v Callais on Wednesday weakens a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for Republicans to eliminate majority-minority congressional districts across the south, and representatives Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures stand in the crosshairs.
“People in my home town fought, braved, died, marched for the right of all Americans to vote,” Sewell, who represents Alabama’s seventh congressional district, said shortly before Wednesday’s decision. “And I know I wouldn’t be here, were it not for the Voting Rights Act. I mean, actually, all Black elected officials. It’s pretty frightening to think that on our collective watch, we’re going backwards and not forwards.”
Figures, who represents Alabama’s newly drawn second congressional district, said the ruling threatens far more than the seats currently held by Black members of Congress. “The impact will be great,” he said in an interview before the decision, anticipating that the court would weaken the landmark voting law. “At the end of the day, the Voting Rights Act is about fairness. It’s about having the opportunity to elect members of Congress of your choice, and not have the district lines drawn in a way that inhibits the ability of a significant racial group to have an impact in the outcome of an election.”
In a ruling split along ideological lines, the supreme court affirmed that Louisiana’s congressional maps violated the equal protection clause. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito held that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which for four decades had been used to challenge electoral maps producing racially discriminatory results, does not require states to draw majority-minority districts. Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the decision effectively eviscerates the law.
‘All we want is fair representation’
The implications for Alabama are immediate and deeply personal for both Sewell and Figures. Republican lawmakers in Alabama will likely move quickly to redraw the state’s congressional maps, Sewell said, but not in time to affect the 2026 midterms. The state’s deadline to qualify as a major party candidate for the 19 May primary was in January, meaning it’s likely too late for Republicans to change maps before the upcoming elections. Sewell and Figures may be safe in November, but Republicans will likely redraw their districts and push them out of Congress in 2028.
Sewell, who represents a swath of the state’s Black Belt that includes Selma, the city where she grew up – has served in Congress since 2011. For 13 of those years, she was the only Democrat in Alabama’s congressional delegation and the only representative from a district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their own choice. Her district, which winds through some of the poorest counties in the nation, was itself a product of the Voting Rights Act, redrawn to give Black Alabamians, who make up about 28% of the state’s population, a voice in federal representation.
Figures’ district, the newly drawn second district, exists solely because of a recent legal victory. The seat was created after the supreme court ruled in Allen v Milligan in 2023 that Alabama’s congressional map illegally diluted Black voting power. That decision reaffirmed section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and compelled Alabama to draw a second opportunity district. Figures, a first-term congressman from Mobile, won that seat in 2024 in what Sewell called a historic moment: for the first time in modern Alabama history, two Black representatives sat together in the congressional delegation.
“It was a long time coming,” Sewell said of that day. “When you think about representation, all we want is fair representation.”
Wednesday’s ruling puts that representation directly at risk. But Sewell and Figures were both clear that the threat extends far beyond Congress. With the Voting Rights Act weakened, representation at all levels is threatened, Sewell said, including in state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and school boards.
“When we go back to a day where majority white counties can now hold only at-large elections,” Sewell warned, “we won’t have Black county commissioners or Black city council members. The implication of Callais is far beyond congressional representation.”
Both lawmakers are already preparing to fight back. Sewell said she plans to work with stakeholders to strengthen the John R Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and shore up federal voting protections weakened by the court’s earlier ruling in Shelby County v Holder. “We came up with the [Voting Rights Act], so we are just going to come up with another law,” she said.
“You better believe we’re going to challenge whatever map that they create,” she added. “This is not over yet.”
Figures said the fight would also require a return to grassroots organizing, drawing on a history that Alabama knows intimately. “The civil rights movement came with an insurance plan,” he said. “It was called the right to vote. It did not come with a supplemental insurance plan to protect the right and choose not to use it.”
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For Sewell, who marched with John Lewis, the late civil rights activist and former US congressman, and grew up in the church where the foot soldiers of Bloody Sunday gathered before crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the moment calls for the same resolve that made Selma possible.
“I think about John Lewis, frail and willowy with cancer on that bridge the last time in 2019,” she said. “They had to hold him up, but his voice was strong: ‘Never give up. Never give in. Keep the faith and keep our eyes on the prize.’ That’s what energizes me now.”
