Adam Liptak

would have the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.

But on Wednesday, by a 6-3 vote, the court's Republican appointees in the majority, the Democratic appointees in dissent, the court installed a new test, one that made it very hard to take race into account in drawing voting districts.

So the court says the Voting Rights Act only kicks in if lawmakers had intended to discriminate against minority voters.

Whatever the effect of, whatever the results of the map are, only intentional racial discrimination, which is very hard to prove,

what was in the lawmakers' heads counts.

That's right.

So a lawmaker could say, and maybe truthfully say, that, hey, I don't mean to discriminate against black people.

I mean to discriminate against Democrats, and I'm allowed to do that.

Partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court said in another case, is not subject to review in the federal courts.

And what this means is a practical matter.

is that districts drawn to ensure that minority voters have the power to elect the candidates they want are now in peril across the country.

So as a general matter, quite right, Michael.

This court, the conservative majority on this court, is uniformly hostile to government decision-making that takes account of race.

It says the Constitution is colorblind, and you shouldn't be sorting people based on their race.

And then more specifically, in the context of the Voting Rights Act,

the majority says that things have changed.

The Voting Rights Act had a role to play back then, but no longer.

And Justice Alito says as much in his majority opinion.

He says, at the time of the act's passage, the nation had faced nearly a century of entrenched racial discrimination in voting, an insidious and pervasive evil, which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.

But the Voting Rights Act led to great strides in the ensuing decades.