The Supreme Court achieved one of the principal goals of the conservative legal movement by destroying the last remaining pillar of Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s six-justice conservative majority effectively dismantled its protections against racial gerrymandering, and thus rendered the once-mighty law a hollow shell of itself.“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s Section 2 precedents in a way that forces states to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”Alito’s majority opinion fundamentally rewrote the court’s Section 2 precedents and the law itself to achieve the conservative bloc’s goals. It raised numerous new hurdles to racial-gerrymandering claims, including some that will likely be insurmountable. It even blessed the use of partisan gerrymandering as an explicit legal defense by states against racial gerrymandering.The effects for American democracy will be corrosive. Southern Republicans will now likely set out to wipe out as many majority-minority congressional districts in the South, some of which were created by past VRA lawsuits, as they feasibly can without diluting other solidly Republican districts. Black representation in Congress will likely plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.Something noble and dignified has also been lost. The Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the members of this Court.”After the 2020 Census, every state redrew their congressional maps to account for population changes over the previous ten years. Louisiana’s map was an obvious gerrymander that locked in Republican control of five districts. The sixth one, centered in and around New Orleans, packed most of Louisiana’s Black residents into an ultra-Democratic district.A coalition of Black voters and voting-rights groups filed a Section 2 challenge to the new map, arguing that Louisiana lawmakers had diluted their electoral power by packing them into a single district. A federal district court agreed and ordered the state to draw a second majority-minority district. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is generally considered to be the country’s most conservative court, upheld that ruling.Normally, that would be the end of that matter. After Louisiana adopted a revised map to comply with the court order in 2023, however, a separate group of plaintiffs who described themselves as “non-African American voters” filed a separate lawsuit to challenge the new map’s constitutionality. They argued that state lawmakers had impermissibly used race as a factor when drawing the new districts, even though the new map was drawn to remedy racial gerrymandering in the first instance.This upside-down approach already had supporters at the Supreme Court. That same year, the high court upheld a court order for Alabama to draw a second majority-minority district, with the court’s liberals joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In a concurring opinion, however, Kavanaugh suggested that he would be open to considering in a future case whether such remedies were themselves a form of racial gerrymandering.Wednesday’s result was hardly a surprise. The high court originally heard Callais during its last term to decide a much narrower question, only to schedule it for reargument this term to allow for a much broader challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Lest there be any doubt about the conservatives’ goals, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an unusual side opinion where he complained about the court’s delay.That frustration only made sense, as I noted at the time, if Thomas knew that there was already at least a five-justice majority for attacking Section 2 and they could simply do it now. But some of the justices apparently wanted to do things by the book, leading to the year-long delay and to Wednesday’s decision. Indeed, Alito wrote on Wednesday that the court had delayed the case to avoid upending elections.I am journalistically obligated to note that conservatives’ attack did not fully succeed. Thomas wanted the court to hold that Section 2 does not apply to redistricting at all, which would leave voters with no mechanism whatsoever to challenge racially gerrymandered maps in court.