Adam Liptak

Yeah, the Supreme Court did further and, in a sense, final damage to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, probably the greatest legislative achievement of the civil rights movement, which was meant to protect minority voting power.

So it was meant to stop Southern officials from using all kinds of methods, from violence to poll taxes to literacy tests

to grandfather clauses, to keep individual Black voters from the voting booth.

But it also meant to ensure that minority voters as a group had the collective power, or at least the opportunity, to elect candidates of their choice.

That's right.

And it worked.

Voter registration and voter turnout numbers in Southern states went from single digits for minority voters to sometimes achieving levels higher than those of white voters.

But this gave rise to an attack from the right and from Republicans because, you know, frankly, protecting minority voters often meant protecting Democratic voters because there's a high degree of correlation between the two.

So in response to challenges from conservatives, the Supreme Court on Wednesday issued the third in a trilogy of decisions that have collectively hollowed out and rendered the Voting Rights Act toothless.

The first one in 2013 cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act, which had required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before they changed voting practices.

The second one in 2021 made it all but impossible to sue under the Voting Rights Act for so-called vote denial claims, claims that election administrators had made it harder to vote by, say, instituting voter ID.

And then this third and last decision on Wednesday took aim at the remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act, which tried to protect minority voting power when it would be diluted so that minority voters could not have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

So the question in the case was whether Louisiana could have two majority-minority voting districts.

Louisiana has six congressional districts.

And not long ago, the state redrew its maps so that Black voters were the majority in two districts rather than just one.

Louisiana is about a third Black.

So if you just do the math, two sounds about right.

But the court said that taking account of race in that way was unlawful.

That's right.

So in the past, the Voting Rights Act would have protected these districts because the understanding of the Voting Rights Act for decades and decades was that it was meant not only to make sure that an individual voter would have the right to vote, but that this community of voters, that minority voters as a collective,