The Supreme Court returns Jim Crow to our election laws | Opinion

This week in Louisiana v. Callais, the six anti-democratic, hyper-partisan, Republican justices of the United States Supreme Court completed their work in repealing the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. I say “repealed” rather than “invalidated” or “held unconstitutional.” The Callais decision has nothing in common with constitutional law.

Rick Hasen, the nation’s leading election law scholar, said the decision “will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.” It is, in Hasen’s view, “the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito.” The decision will “bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures and city councils.” It “protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republicans.” It will return Jim Crow election laws to the South and the nation, Hasen could have added. That is its purpose.

Callais is even more infuriating because it is written by Justice Samuel Alito. It can’t be read without Alito’s pious hypocrisies ringing in your ears. When Alito wrote his dystopian Dobbs decision in 2022 — casting aside fifty years of reproductive freedom — he boasted his fealty to originalism. It was crucial to limit constitutional interpretation, he proclaimed, through “historical inquiry into our deeply rooted traditions.” It’s the constitution as originally written that matters. No history, no law.

That’s inconvenient in Callais. The folks who wrote the Reconstruction Amendments repeatedly embraced race conscious legislation to protect the former slaves. They adopted racial remedies to respond to our shamed and brutal history of degradation. So what does Alito do with that reality? He just ignores his earlier protestations, saying, in effect, “oh, I’m not thinking of originalism today.”

Of course this is the pattern of Republican originalist forgetfulness. The UNC admissions case, the Shelby County case (also voting rights), the Sebelius case (Affordable Care Act), Citizens United – all turn their backs on history to favor Republican political preference. And, my word, Trump v United States – the absolute immunity decision – is the least tethered ruling to constitutional text, framers’ intention and historical practice in American judicial history. Alito’s originalism only limits the claims of his adversaries; never his own. It is stunning he can be sanctimonious about it.

Here’s a new reform I’d embrace for the Roberts Court. Let them just report the justices’ tally. “Appellant wins 6-3”. No explanations. No words. No breathtaking hypocrisies. I’d rather have silence than deceit.

The Roberts Court has proven — pervasively, repeatedly, stunningly — its existential opposition to constitutional democracy. It is going to persist. Democrats should move, as a central part of their agenda, to seek the impeachment of Alito and Brent Kavanaugh. It’s a beginning. Count One could be repeatedly violating their oaths of office. Count Two could be habitually lying through their teeth.

When Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act in 1965, he said famously:

“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

“This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South. ‘All men are created equal.’ ‘Government by consent of the governed’. ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ Those are not just clever words or empty theories. In their name, Americans have fought and died for two centuries. “

The United States Supreme Court has decided it’s time for such sentiments to go.

Contributing columnist Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

This story was originally published April 30, 2026 at 3:18 PM with the headline "The Supreme Court returns Jim Crow to our election laws | Opinion."