May 4, 2026: No Need for the Voting Rights Act! Who Knew Racism is Dead?
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Gutting the Voting Rights Act: Protecting the Tyranny of the Few
This week the Supreme Court continued its recent cynical assault on democracy by deciding to gut the last remaining leg of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the ACLU stated, it’s a “betrayal of the Civil Rights Movement” and also so much more. When diverse voices are silenced, their representation marginalized, and opportunities limited, it is not “their” issue but our issue. We all lose.
And so the tyranny of a minority continues as long as we let them. It's up to us to hold those who support them accountable to the electorate. It’s exhausting to continually fight these post-Civil War battles, but we must. We don’t have the right to walk away from the sacrifices and courage of the many who have contributed to our Republic, lost their lives in battle, or were killed because they wanted the right to vote. Our rage must focus on what’s required next: organizing, voting, and choosing to resist despair with our actions.
Context: We interrupt this broadcast… On the night of March 7, 1965, ABC News interrupted its widely viewed television premier of the film Judgement at Nuremberg and shocked America with coverage of our own problem with white supremacists. We didn't have to wrestle with Nazi crimes but with our own. Peaceful civil rights marches were crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama to assert their dignity and right to vote. They were assaulted and bludgeoned by Alabama state police, sheriff’s deputies, and white vigilantes. Thinking of the Nazis this was no longer tolerable.
Below: Civil Rights hero John Lewis is beaten to near death and his skull is fractured by law enforcement.
Edmund Pettus had been a senior Confederate officer and traitor who (as treason was forgiven after the assassination of President Lincoln) was admitted to Congress soon after the war to represent Alabama as a Senator. He was also the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
Below: "Bloody Sunday", Courtesy of U.S. Department of State, GPA Photo Archive
“Bloody Sunday” on the Pettus Bridge, in the context of wrestling with a film about Nazi terror and murder, shook the American conscience and moved the federal government to pass the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. Full democracy had finally been achieved as we confronted our past with shame and responsibility.
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments These Reconstruction Amendments were added in gratitude for Black soldiers who played a crucial role in winning the Civil War and who had served in every war since the Revolution. They failed because Reconstruction was halted by President Johnson in 1870 and states found a way around the texts. The 13th, for example, ended slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime…duly convicted”. This text allowed states to recreate slavery under Jim Crow. All they had to do was accuse and convict black men of crimes - often fabricated.
Above: Harpers' Weekly, April 22. 1865.
Constitutional Amendments mean nothing without legislation supporting their enforcement. There have been many who wanted these parts of the Constitution overturned ever since. In 1927, for example, the American eugenics movement helped the Supreme Court to undermine the 14th’s equal protection under the law clause. In Buck v. Bell forced sterilizations of women (without their consent) was allowed, indeed encouraged, if they women were defined as "feebleminded" threats to the nation's blood. Even though eugenics was rejected as unscientific racism, the Court's ruling still stands.
Recently, President Trump and the GOP-manipulated Supreme Court has worked to destroy the 14th Amendment’s clauses of birthright citizenship (specifically granted to allow former slaves rights and equal protections under the law after the Civil War) and the 15th’s right to vote. Why should minorities and women continually have to fight for the rights the rest of us take for granted? It is immoral and unjust.
Voting Rights Act (VRA) The VRA was designed to enforce the 15th Amendment's denying the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The VRA removed Jim Crow barriers to voting. It was expanded five times by Congress to protect language minorities including Hispanic, Native American, and Asian communities. We were building a more perfect union.
Undermining the VRA And then, Chief Justice John Roberts declared (soon after joining the bench in 2005) that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." It was a cynically consistent framing of “white (whatever that means) grievance” that “they” are indeed the victims. This echoed the South's rewriting the War of Southern Aggression (the Civil War) as a "Lost Cause" where in their defeat they were the victims - oh yes, and that slavery was just grand! Rewriting history is a convenient way to ignore our responsibility to the past. Justice Roberts articulated what was to come. But hey, at least it sounded fair.
In 2013 the Roberts’ Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v Holder to dismantle a part of the VRA that required states with a history of discrimination to obtain Justice Department approval before changing their election procedures. This allowed states to change election laws without federal oversight which, unsurprisingly, led to the closing of voting places for minorities and voter ID suppression initiatives – the very thing the 15th was designed to stop.
In 2021 the Court ruled in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee to weaken Section 2 of the VRA by allowing for what amounted to voter suppression.
What Just Happened? This past Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling on Louisiana v. Callais was the final blow to what was left of the VRA in Section 2.
The courts ruled that gerrymandering had disenfranchised about one third of Louisiana's Black population and ordered new, fairer districts to be drawn. A group of white Louisiana citizens claimed that as “non-African Americans” (clever) they were being discriminated against. It was akin to boys arguing they're discriminated against because they can't join the Girl Scouts. Justices Roberts and Alito agreed and justified their ruling by falsely arguing that because the VRA had succeeded so well in “eliminating racial discrimination in voting” it was no longer needed.
Let's get this logic straight: And so, because racism no longer exists (follow along), and only white people are victims of the thing that doesn't exist, white people must protect themselves from that thing that does (or doesn't?) exist. Let's try it another way. It’s like saying that because fewer people have drowned because lifeboats were added to passenger liners, there's really no need for them anymore. Get it? Simplistic logic can work in the favor of bigots, racists, the privileged, the ignorant, and powerful because hey, it sounds reasonable.
And so, they ruled that the district created to give black people representation was unconstitutional. Oh yes, they simultaneously increased the requirements to prove discrimination moving forward. It will now become more difficult to produce evidence that districts are being redrawn to reduce Black or Latino voting power and not because of political reasons.
Intent Proving intent is one of the most difficult things to do in a court. Justice Kagan’s dissent pointed out: “Now, as then, vote-dilution plaintiffs will have to show more than vote dilution: They will have to show, as well, race-based motive. Now, as then, that requirement will make success in their suits nearly impossible.”
No Oversight Louisiana has immediately gotten to work in redistricting that would limit black representation while gerrymandering districts to protect GOP candidates. Florida, another GOP-dominated state, is poised to use the ruling to gerrymander their electoral maps. We're about to enter a phase of nation-wide gerrymandering by both parties which will weaken democratic accountability, strengthen separate political identities and divisions, make politicians more dependent on donor funding, and make politics more toxic and divisive.
The Roberts Court has aligned itself with Trump’s ongoing efforts to restrict voting and influence the upcoming midterm elections.
Progress is Threatening White supremacy never left politics or society. The VRA opened the doors to power for those representing a more diverse American experience. In 1964, there were only four Black people in Congress and zero in the Senate. Today, there are 67 Black people and 56 Latinos in Congress, the highest number for both groups in this country’s history. Similarly, in 1964, there were just 13 women in Congress and today there are 154. This is what's intolerable for white supremacists.
My Turn We've let the wolves loose again and they've done exactly and predictably what they are ideologically driven to do. They've attacked democratic life because they find equity and equal access intolerable. They've claimed victimhood while victimizing others. Pandora’s box is open again… and must be forced shut, again.
I grew up believing that despite our flaws as a nation we were looking for solutions and finding ways forward. The last few decades have shown us that this is not a given. The powerful forces of landed aristocratic enslavers who rejected Lincoln's election and embraced privilege (they didn't have to fight in the war they were about to start to keep people enslaved) are the same people today: election deniers, privileged, and anti-democratic Americans. We'll need to engage in a new Reconstruction era this time not because of anti-democratic privileged enslavers but because of a New York City entitled bigot.
Unlike the last time (with a few exceptions) we're going to have to have trials. Due process for those who have committed war crimes and for those who have betrayed our Republic. Unlike 1870, we will hold them accountable to the law in order to find a better path forward.
President Lincoln guided us: "The ballot is stronger than the bullet". November is coming and things will get much rougher until then. But this time we don't have to sacrifice on the battlefield. We just need to be present, stand together, and vote. Lincoln's words from Gettysburg still resonate in the current challenge and victory that lies ahead:
"It is for us, the living, to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work so nobly advanced by those who fought here, and to the great task that remains: to take renewed devotion from these honored dead who gave their last full measure, to resolve that they did not die in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/30/politics/video/john-lewis-voting-rights-act-2018-bash-vrtc
