It was four short years ago the U.S. Supreme Court undid the rights of American women to have control over their own bodies with their undoing of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
And last week, in a willfully racist, tone-deaf decision, the Supreme Court finished the job Chief Justice John Roberts began in 2013 with the Shelby County v. Holder decision that kickstarted the court’s chipping away of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act — a centerpiece of LBJ’s Great Society that curbed racist behavior and deliberate voter disenfranchisement in the old Confederacy — by opting to eviscerate the entirety of the critical Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that ensured the federal government’s commitment to racial equality in elections by a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais.
Before the decision’s ink was even dry and the corpse of the Voting Rights Act laid to rest, racist Republican-majority statehouses in the old Confederacy, Tennessee and Alabama most notoriously, immediately began mid-decade restricting deliberately designed to wipe out majority-minority districts and corresponding Democratic votes. They didn’t even try to pretend it was anything else.
It’s now clear the only thing that kept these southern “red” states in line over the decades on redistricting was the Voting Rights Act, which six of the U.S. Supreme Court’s justices predicated on undoing because racism, as they argued, is a thing of the past in the United States in 2026. Without a sense of self-awareness or even shame, the old grotesque Confederacy showed how clearly wrong that real or imagined presumption was, and how clearly the Voting Rights Act had ably served its purpose for 61 years until its murder on April 29th.
After all, the Voting Rights Act certainly didn’t die of natural causes, and never in all its 61 years was there ever any real public groundswell to do away with it. Even George Wallace acquiesced to the law’s provisions without great complaint.
And the redistricting now underway in the old Confederacy? It’s not being done by the referendums of voters, as was the case in California and Virginia this year in response to initial GOP mid-decade redistricting in Texas and North Carolina, but in the exclusionary, smoke-filled rooms of southern statehouses.
Just like in the old days.
Just like during Jim Crow.
Photo of the Voting Rights Act signing ceremony on August 6th, 1965, courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.