the edit, vol. 32

sixty years

On August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law at a ceremony attended by Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and John Lewis. Johnson had addressed a joint session of Congress five months earlier, in the wake of Bloody Sunday — the day that state troopers in Selma, Alabama, beat peaceful marchers with clubs and tear gas on national television. His speech ended with two words borrowed from the movement itself: "We shall overcome."

The law that followed was the most significant federal intervention in voting since Reconstruction. It abolished literacy tests. It required states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval — "preclearance" — before changing any voting rule. It sent federal examiners into covered jurisdictions to ensure that qualified citizens could register. It was, in the words of the National Archives, "the most significant statutory change in the relationship between the federal and state governments in the area of voting since the Reconstruction period following the Civil War."

This week, sixty-one years later, a 6-3 Supreme Court gutted the last meaningful provision protecting it.

The law is still on the books, and Almost nothing remains inside it.

What It Was Built to Stop

To understand what has been lost, it helps to understand what existed before.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race. For about a decade during Reconstruction, it produced results: Black men voted, held office, served in Congress. Then Reconstruction ended, federal troops withdrew, and Southern states spent the next ninety years systematically dismantling what the amendment had promised.

The tools were varied and carefully designed. Poll taxes — fees required to vote that were calibrated to be unaffordable for recently freed people with no accumulated wealth. Literacy tests — administered selectively, with white applicants given easy questions and Black applicants given impossible ones, or simply turned away regardless of their answers. Grandfather clauses that exempted voters whose ancestors had voted — which excluded everyone whose ancestors had been enslaved. Violence, economic retaliation, and the constant threat of both for anyone who tried to register anyway.

In Mississippi in 1964, 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered. In Alabama, it was 19.3 percent… These were not natural conditions. They were the product of a century of deliberate, systematic, legally sanctioned suppression.

The Voting Rights Act was the federal government's response to the evidence that the Fifteenth Amendment alone — without enforcement mechanisms — was not sufficient. The amendment had existed for ninety-five years. It had not produced equal access to the ballot. The VRA was an attempt to finally create the machinery to make it real.

What It Accomplished

The results were immediate and measurable.

The registration gap between white and Black voters in the South, which had stood at nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s, fell to 8 percentage points within a decade of the law's passage. Federal examiners registered hundreds of thousands of voters in covered jurisdictions within the first year. Black candidates began winning offices they had been systematically excluded from for a century.

The law was reauthorized in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006 — each time with broad bipartisan support, each time with Congress reviewing the evidence of ongoing discrimination and concluding that the protections remained necessary. The 2006 reauthorization passed the Senate unanimously. It was signed by George W. Bush. Republicans and Democrats together looked at the data and concluded, without meaningful dissent, that the law still needed to exist.

The preclearance requirement under Section 5 blocked more than 1,000 discriminatory voting changes between 1965 and 2013. The Justice Department used Section 2 to challenge at-large voting schemes, racially gerrymandered maps, and polling place changes designed to suppress minority turnout. The law was not perfect — it was litigated constantly, and its protections were uneven — but it created a legal framework in which racial discrimination in voting was, at minimum, challengeable.

That framework has now been systematically dismantled.

The Thirteen-Year Dismantling

The process began in 2013.

In Shelby County v. Holder, a 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the formula that determined which states were required to seek preclearance under Section 5. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, argued that the formula was based on outdated data — that conditions had changed enough since 1965 that it was no longer appropriate to treat covered states differently. The majority left Section 5 itself technically intact but rendered it inoperable: without a valid coverage formula, no state was subject to preclearance.

The dissent, written by Justice Ginsburg, offered a different analysis. The preclearance requirement was working, she argued, precisely because it was preventing the discrimination before it happened rather than requiring victims to litigate it after the fact. Removing the requirement because discrimination had decreased was, she wrote, "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

The states that had been subject to preclearance moved quickly. Within 24 hours of the Shelby decision, Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had previously been blocked. North Carolina passed a sweeping package of voting restrictions within weeks. The Brennan Center found that in the years following Shelby, the racial gap in voter turnout grew in jurisdictions that had previously been covered.

Congress could have created a new coverage formula. It did not. Bills were introduced. None passed. The Senate, which had reauthorized the VRA unanimously in 2006, could not find the votes to repair what Shelby had broken.

Then came Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, which substantially narrowed the conditions under which plaintiffs could bring successful Section 2 challenges. The Court established guideposts that made it significantly harder to prove that a voting rule had a discriminatory effect. Legal scholars noted that the ruling effectively raised the bar for Section 2 claims without formally changing the standard — a pattern of erosion that left the text of the law in place while hollowing out its enforceability.

This week's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais completed the process.

What Happened This Week

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the conservative majority all but eliminated Section 2's protection against racial gerrymandering.

Justice Alito, writing for the majority, argued that the Constitution "almost never permits" racial considerations in drawing district lines — that Louisiana did not have a compelling interest to justify creating a second majority-Black congressional district. The ruling effectively made it nearly impossible for plaintiffs to bring successful vote-dilution claims: to use race in drawing a remedial district is now treated as the same constitutional problem as the discrimination the district was drawn to remedy.

Justice Kagan's dissent was direct. Plaintiffs alleging racial vote-dilution schemes will now find it, in her words, "nearly impossible" to succeed in court. The NAACP's general counsel said: "Very little remains."

The states did not wait for the ink to dry. Within eight days of the ruling: Florida moved to redraw four congressional districts. Tennessee dissolved its only majority-Black congressional district, carving up Memphis between multiple Republican-leaning seats. Louisiana paused its own primaries to redraw maps. Mississippi called a special legislative session. The Cook Political Report estimated that the ruling could flip between four and eight House seats nationally — in a midterm cycle where Trump's approval rating sits at approximately 40 percent and Republicans face the prospect of losing their majority.

The timing is not incidental. The law that was designed to ensure that political power could not be structured to exclude people based on race has now been functionally dismantled in the same year that the party in power faces electoral accountability for its decisions.

What This Kind of Loss Looks Like

There is a specific quality to watching a legal protection that took a century of organizing to create get dismantled in thirteen years.

The Fifteenth Amendment passed in 1870. It took ninety-five years of continued suppression — literacy tests, poll taxes, violence, Bloody Sunday — before Congress finally enacted the enforcement mechanisms that gave it practical force. The people who organized for those ninety-five years did not live to see the result. Many of them were killed trying to get there.

The VRA was reauthorized five times. Each reauthorization required Congress to look at the evidence of ongoing discrimination and conclude that the protections were still necessary. As recently as 2006, both parties looked at that evidence and agreed. The law represented not just a policy outcome but an institutional consensus — a shared acknowledgment that the promise of equal participation in democracy required active federal protection to be real.

What has been established since 2013 is a different institutional consensus: that the tools designed to detect and prevent racial discrimination in voting are more constitutionally suspect than the discrimination they were designed to prevent. That the remedy is worse than the disease. That states with documented histories of voting discrimination have a fundamental right to sovereignty over their electoral systems that outweighs the federal interest in ensuring equal access to the ballot.

This is not a politically neutral position. It has specific beneficiaries and specific victims. But it has now been established as the controlling interpretation of federal law, and the political branches have not moved to counter it.

The Open Question

There is a question underneath all of this that is worth sitting with, because it does not have a comfortable answer.

Democratic progress is not linear. The history of voting rights in America is a history of gains made and then reversed, protections established and then eroded, constitutional promises made and then left unenforced for generations. Reconstruction produced real political power for Black Americans and was then systematically dismantled over decades. The VRA produced real gains and has been systematically dismantled over thirteen years.

What the pattern suggests is that legal protections for political participation are only as durable as the institutional will to enforce them — and that institutional will is itself subject to political capture. The Supreme Court that gutted Section 5 in 2013 had been shaped by decades of deliberate effort to place justices on the bench who held a particular view of federal power and racial remediation. The ruling did not come from nowhere. It was the product of a long, patient, strategic project.