Thursday, April 30, 2026
John Roberts’ effort to gut the Voting Rights Act is complete
John Roberts’ effort to gut the Voting Rights Act is complete
“The Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday rolling back protections for Black and Latino voters marks another dramatic turn in the long-fought effort by conservative justices to reverse measures vital to overcoming America’s legacy of race discrimination.
The decision also marks a defining moment for the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, who declared soon after joining the bench in 2005, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Three years ago, the justices by the same 6-3 vote as Wednesday ended racial affirmative action in higher education admissions. The newest decision, which follows a series of rulings led by Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito restricting the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, will reverberate deeper.
Taken as a whole, the pattern would mean fewer chances for minority voters to elect candidates of their choosing. That, in turn, would mean fewer opportunities for the voice of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities in government.
The gravity of such consequences and the entrenched divisions among the justices were clear as the opinion was announced from the courtroom bench.
CNN's chief supreme court analyst reacts to bombshell ruling
1:52
As Roberts first revealed that the case of Louisiana v. Callais would be delivered, he said Alito had the majority opinion. Roberts, whose seniority gives him the assignment power, had turned the case over to a colleague with whom he has long worked on racial issues.
Belying the historic nature of the decision, Alito began in his usual dry tone, detailing the lower court action in the long running Louisiana case, which began with redistricting after the 2020 census. He related the intricacies of the VRA’s disputed Section 2 that prohibits discrimination and recounted the evolution of standards for assessing when Black and other minority voters may succeed in a challenge to district maps that dilute their voting power.
Such dilution can arise, for example, from legislative “cracking” and “packing” methods – that is, dispersing or concentrating Black voters among districts to weaken their overall voting power.
No longer would challengers be able to point to the effects of vote dilution, Alito said. Rather, they would have to show that state legislators likely had discriminatory purpose or, as Alito spelled out in his opinion, that “circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”
Alito’s bench statement and written opinion on behalf of the six conservative justices leaned heavily on the view of Roberts’ 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that voting safeguards enshrined in 1965 were no longer essential to America.
“(V)ast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South…” Alito wrote. Adapting a line from Roberts’ 2013 decision, he added: “As this Court has recognized, ‘things have changed dramatically’ in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.”
When Justice Elena Kagan, who sits next to Alito on the elevated bench, then spoke for the three dissenting liberals, she referred explicitly and emphatically to Shelby County and the line of cases eviscerating voting rights protections.
“This court’s project to destroy the Voting Rights Act is now complete,” she declared. Of the act, she said, “It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.”
As both Roberts and Alito looked out at spectators expressionless, Kagan said, “For over a decade, this court has set its sights on the Voting Rights Act.”
Indeed, Wednesday’s decision may have been inevitable, given the transformed bench since Roberts took control over two decades ago. Four new conservative justices have joined, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term.
Now the Roberts Court’s goal notably aligns with Trump’s own efforts to curtail voting-rights protections and influence the upcoming midterm elections. Officials in some Republican-dominated states, including Florida, were immediately poised Wednesday to take advantage of the ruling and redraw their maps.
And with what Kagan described as the court’s “made-up and impossible-to-meet evidentiary standards,” she warned that the decision “greenlights districting plans” that would disadvantage minorities nationwide.
George W. Bush nominees work in tandem
Roberts has led the court to end race-based policies in public schools, in higher education and, most sweepingly, in voting laws. With a few exceptions, he has been in sync with Alito, who joined the bench in January 2006, four months after Roberts.
Both men were appointed by President George W. Bush, and while they differ temperamentally and in regard for institutional appearances, they are more often than not together.
When Roberts held prominent roles in the Ronald Reagan and then George H.W. Bush administrations in the 1980s and 1990s, he advocated for a limited interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. In memos from the time, Roberts demonstrated that he believed federal protections for Black, Hispanic and other minority voters from the 1960s civil rights era were no longer warranted.
Only since becoming chief justice has he been able to carry through on his vision. It was a vision Alito wove throughout Wednesday’s opinion.
He included several references to the landmark Shelby County decision. In that 2013 case, the majority dismantled a part of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to obtain Justice Department approval before changing their election procedures.
Alito joined him in 2013 and earlier, in a 2006 case, when Roberts wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” (Alito was the only justice to sign that opinion, a partial dissent and concurrence, in a Texas redistricting dispute.)
It was in a 2007 school integration controversy when Roberts wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Alito, along with other conservatives, joined the chief justice there, as well as in 2023 when Roberts led the court to end racial affirmative action. Alito made a brief reference to that Harvard case Wednesday, too.
Midterms looming
Most crucial for the nation’s history of race discrimination, Wednesday’s action further diminishes the iconic 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law that brought the franchise to Black voters and other racial minorities who’d been kept from the polls.
The VRA was passed only after the “Bloody Sunday” attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. During that March 7, 1965, encounter, sheriff’s deputies beat civil rights marchers as they tried to cross the bridge.
What Dr. King told John Lewis after Bloody Sunday
1:23
With such history, this area of the law has long produced sharply divided opinions, and there were earlier signs that the justices were struggling with the Louisiana controversy.
The Louisiana case had first been argued two years ago, but then the justices called for reargument, foreshadowing that the conservatives might be headed for a substantial ruling affecting voting rights not only in Louisiana but across the nation.
A lower federal court had found Louisiana legislators likely violated Section 2 and ordered a second Black-majority district created. (Previously, only one of the six Louisiana congressional districts had a Black majority.)
A group of White residents then challenged the redrawn map, arguing that the common Section 2 remedy amounted to a breach of the Constitution’s equality guarantee. The group pointed to the high court’s broader trend of disfavoring race-based programs.
The justices had slightly departed from that pattern in a 2023 redistricting case from Alabama, when they said that the use of race was not only permissible but might be required, to compensate for a prior discriminatory map. That will now be seen as a one-off.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court did not explicitly go as far as the White challengers wanted, to outlaw any consideration of race to remedy an allegedly biased map. Still, in the highly partisan world of redistricting, it will be difficult for any challenger to produce evidence that a district was drawn not for any political reasons but based specifically to dilute Black or Latino voting power.
The Alito majority picked up from a 2021 ruling he had written in the Arizona case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. There, the same six-justice majority limited the Voting Right Act Section 2 coverage for certain electoral practices that did not involve redistricting. The court upheld requirements that ballots cast at the wrong precinct be discarded and that criminalized the third-party collection of absentee ballots (such as were sometimes used in remote tribal areas of the state).
Alito pointed to the decision as another precedent paving the way for view of VRA liability only when a practice is motivated by a discriminatory purpose.
Kagan did not quarrel with the assertion but rather used it to reinforce her argument that the conservative majority had been strategically building to this moment – a moment that she said conflicted with the essential goal of the Voting Rights Act.
“Even after the Fifteenth Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, state officials routinely deprived African Americans of their voting rights,” she recounted.
“Through a seemingly boundless array of mechanisms – most of them facially race-neutral and among them the drawing of district lines – States either prevented Black citizens from casting ballots or ensured that their votes would count for next to nothing,” Kagan wrote.
“The Voting Rights Act was meant as the corrective,” she added.
Roberts in 2013 and Alito on Wednesday acknowledged the legacy surrounding the Voting Rights Act. But as happened in the 2013 milestone, Alito and the others in the majority deployed that success to brush aside the remaining effects of racial bias.
“‘(O)ur Nation has made great strides’ in eliminating racial discrimination in voting,” Alito wrote Wednesday, citing Roberts in 2013. “And if, as a result of this progress, it is hard to find pertinent evidence relating to intentional present-day voting discrimination, that is cause for celebration.”
How the Voting Rights Decision May Block the Rise of Young Black Leaders - The New York Times
How the Voting Rights Decision May Block the Rise of Young Black Leaders
The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a Louisiana voting map could hinder the rise of young Black leaders in the South. This ruling, which weakens the Voting Rights Act, may lead to redistricting that diminishes the influence of Black Democrats and their ability to secure political office. The decision could also impact state legislative districts and local bodies, potentially disrupting the pipeline of Black political talent.
Black Democrats in the South already face steep challenges when seeking political office. But the Supreme Court’s ruling could be felt for a generation.
Evan Turnage left a job on Capitol Hill and returned home to Mississippi to run for Congress. It didn’t pan out; he lost a Democratic primary in March against a popular incumbent. But by crisscrossing the region and building name recognition, he thought he had laid groundwork that could pay off later.
Next time, though, he could face an even more formidable hurdle: His district, long drawn to have a majority-Black constituency, could be redrawn to become practically impossible for a Black Democrat to win.
Across the South, Republican officials are ready to quickly redraw legislative districts, seizing upon the Supreme Court decision on Wednesday that struck down a voting map in Louisiana and further weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act, which for decades helped usher in generations of Black leaders.
Critics of the decision expect that any reconfiguration will not only endanger Black incumbents, some of whom have held office for decades, but also threaten a rising generation of Black Democrats in the South, who already have few avenues for ascending in politics.
“It’s going to mean for a lot of people that they leave politics altogether, because there aren’t districts that make sense,” said Mr. Turnage, 34, who ran in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District, which is regarded as vulnerable to redistricting. “It’s definitely going to be devastating.”
Republicans have solidified their control in many Southern states, claiming virtually all statewide elected offices and building supermajorities in several legislatures. The congressional districts carved out for majority-Black representation have become rare and coveted platforms, lifting Black leaders to prominence in the Democratic Party and the broader political arena.
“This case has the potential to essentially stop Black political representation from advancing in the way that we know it,” said Emmitt Y. Riley III, a politics professor at Sewanee, the University of the South.
In recent years, frustration has stewed among some younger Black Democrats over older lawmakers who have held onto seats, even as some have reached their 80s and seen their health decline.
Still, there was a recognition that a generational handoff was inevitable and rapidly approaching.
Black members of the U.S. House of Representatives
Number of Black representatives in office by election cycle
Voting Rights Act signed
1965
10
20
30
40
50
60
Newly elected
Already in office
1870
1900
’20
’40
’60
’80
2000
’20
The court’s decision has the potential to upend that transition. Strategists and political analysts have warned it could deny that rising political talent the opportunity to win seats in Congress, much less wield the influence of their predecessors.
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The decision could reach deeper into the government, because it could also apply to state legislative districts and local bodies, including city councils and county boards, where the Voting Rights Act has influenced how maps are drawn.
“What do the next 10 years look like if we disrupt the pipeline?” asked Glynda C. Carr, the president and chief executive of Higher Heights for America, a political action committee that supports progressive women of color running for elected office.
Other career paths could be at risk, including staff positions and internships that often set up young adults for careers in government and public service. Research has indicated that elected officials of color, particularly in Congress, tend to have staffs — and aides in senior roles — that are more demographically reflective of the broader population.
“None of us working on Capitol Hill would have gotten there without that foot in the door,” said Representative Shomari Figures of Alabama, a 40-year-old former congressional and White House aide, who was elected as a Democrat in 2024 to a newly drawn majority-minority districtcreated after a long legal fight that reached the Supreme Court.
In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. cast the ruling as limited in scope and upholding the central tenets of the Voting Rights Act. But he said that Louisiana had violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause when it created a second majority-Black district to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Justice Alito wrote that “vast social change,” particularly in the South, meant that giving such weight to racial considerations — including past discrimination and “present-day disparities” — was no longer necessary. Yet he also couched the decision as an update to the Voting Rights Act’s framework, not a dismantling of it.
But critics said that, in effect, the court’s decision gutted the law.
And an analysis by The New York Times from last year identified as many as a dozen majority-minority House districts across the South that Democrats could lose to redistricting if the law was severely diminished.
Activists and political observers argued that many prominent Southern lawmakers represented not only the interests of their districts in Washington, but also the experiences, values and priorities of people who do not have much voice otherwise. Now these lawmakers are at risk.
Those lawmakers could include Representative Bennie Thompson, once a small-town mayor in Mississippi, who has emerged as a high-profile opponent of President Trump, and Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, who has been one of the highest-ranking House Democrats for decades.
“That sort of specific viewpoint really matters,” said Mr. Turnage, who served as a senior aide to Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. “Having that voice in the room, I can tell you, does shape how your caucus or how the entire body thinks about certain issues.”
National Democrats have viewed some parts of the Southeast, like Georgia and North Carolina, as ripe for investment, thanks to population growth and increasing racial and ethnic diversity. Those factors played a role in Georgia’s transformation over the past decade from a Republican stronghold to a swing state.
Some Black candidates in Georgia have won in majority-white districts, like Representative Lucy McBath, who ousted a Republican incumbent in the Atlanta suburbs in 2018. Raphael Warnock of Georgia built an old-fashioned coalition of Black and white voters to win in the Senate. And political analysts believe some Black lawmakers, like those in and around Atlanta, are likely to be safe from redistricting efforts.
Yet elsewhere in the region, particularly in the Deep South, many expect an already forbidding political landscape to become even tougher.
Anthony Daniels, the Democratic minority leader in the Alabama House of Representatives, listed legislators and local elected officials he thought could be credible candidates to run state agencies or hold statewide office.
But, he said, their chances of attaining those positions are diminished in Alabama, where Democrats struggle to be competitive and racism remains a major barrier.
“I have some of the best minds in the state,” he said. But, he added, it can seem as though that talent has “no chance of being noticed.” Mr. Daniels suggested that even with sustained and incremental focus, it could take years, maybe even a generation, to yield results.
“You’ve got to build out a way to engage voters,” he said, “and to build out your pipeline from the city council to the school board, to the county commission, to the mayor’s office and to the legislature.”
Many Black politicians said they would now draw upon a certain strain of optimism threaded throughout Southern history — one that is jaded by experience but also buoyant.
Mr. Turnage finds solace in the example of his grandparents, who were born in the 1920s and could not vote until they were in their 40s. They were able to support Black congressmen, like Mr. Thompson and his predecessor, Mike Espy, and vote for President Barack Obama.
Mr. Turnage has not made any specific decisions about his future in politics. But he said that he, for one, was not retreating from public service.
“I’m in it,” he said. “I’m in the fight.”
Journalist Detained in Kuwait Says He Was Stripped of Citizenship - The New York Times
Journalist Detained in Kuwait Says He Was Stripped of Citizenship
"Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a Kuwaiti-American, was held for several weeks after posting about the Iran war. Kuwait does not appear to have commented publicly on his case.
A prominent Kuwaiti-American journalist said on Wednesday that his citizenship had been revoked by Kuwait, where he was detained for several weeks on vague charges related to national security. He was arrested after posting on social media about the Iran war.
The case of the journalist, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, has highlighted a crackdown on speech and social media usage in the authoritarian Persian Gulf countries since the war began in late February.
Mr. Shihab-Eldin, who has contributed to the BBC and Al Jazeera English and had also worked for The New York Times, was released from detention last week after being partially acquitted of the charges he faced, and he has since left Kuwait, according to his international legal team.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Shihab-Eldin said that the Kuwaiti government had stripped him and his sisters of their citizenship, according to a statement shared by his international lawyers.
The Kuwaiti government does not appear to have addressed his case publicly. The Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington and an official at Kuwait’s Ministry of Information did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Tens of thousands of Kuwaitis have lost their citizenship over the past two years as the government carries out a sweeping, exclusionary campaign to redefine what it means to be Kuwaiti.
“The past seven weeks have been a harrowing ordeal — one that has only strengthened my resolve in the face of injustice,” Mr. Shihab-Eldin said in the statement. “For now, I am focusing on recovery. In time, I will speak about what I endured.”
Mr. Shihab-Eldin was born in the United States to parents of Palestinian descent. His mother, like many Palestinians displaced after the creation of Israel, eventually settled in Kuwait, he has said.
Mr. Shihab-Eldin has produced documentaries on sensitive human rights topics in the Middle East. He was detained in early March while visiting Kuwait and charged with spreading false information, harming national security and misusing his mobile phone, according to his international legal team.
He was arrested after making comments online about the Iran war and sharing a video showing a U.S. fighter jet that had crashed near an air base in Kuwait, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. The jet was one of three that the U.S. military said were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses. Mr. Shihab-Eldin’s detention was condemned by international rights groups.
“Stripping Shihab-Eldin of his citizenship is not just punitive, it is a dangerous escalation in the use of state power to crush press freedom,” Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Project Journalists, said in a statement. “Weaponizing nationality to punish reporting sets a chilling precedent for every journalist in Kuwait and the Gulf.”
Since the war began, the authorities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have arrestedhundreds of people for “spreading rumors” or sharing footage of Iranian strikes in their countries, according to official news agencies. In the Emirates and Bahrain, some people have been charged with “glorifying” Iranian attacks.
Analysts say that while the arrests were partly motivated by national security concerns, Gulf officials also fear that imagery and commentary on the attacks could damage their countries’ images as safe havens in a turbulent region.
In March, the Emirati authorities arrested a videographer for an international news outlet, accusing him of filming in “restricted areas without obtaining the necessary official permits.”
And this month, Bahrain moved to strip dozens of citizens of their nationality, accusing them of betraying their country and threatening national security.
A preliminary verdict issued last week in Mr. Shihab-Eldin’s case acquitted him of spreading false information and “refrained from pronouncing punishment” on the other two charges, his legal team said.
“I am free — but many remain behind bars in Kuwait and across the region for speaking the truth,” Mr. Shihab-Eldin said in his statement. “I will continue to use my voice to demand justice and accountability for all.”
Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."
Iranians Live With Pain and Powerlessness, Beneath a Smooth Veneer - The New York Times
Iranians Live With Pain and Powerlessness, Beneath a Smooth Veneer
"After months of upheaval, many are attempting to get on with their lives while quietly grappling with grief, economic stress and a loss of hope.
On the surface, Iranian society appears to be functioning normally, at least for a country that weeks ago was under heavy bombardment.
Hip young people gather outside street cafes in Tehran, smoking and chatting with friends. Tickets to a high-profile rock concert in the city sold out in minutes. And people still travel outside Iran for leisure and for work.
That is all a veneer, many Iranians say, masking the painful and precarious conditions that they are living with. Four months of traumatic, world-shaking events — a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests followed by a devastating war — have dashed hopes for the future, and left large parts of society in grief, feeling powerless.
“People are living their lives,” said Sara, an Iranian woman in her 40s living in Turkey, who had traveled to Tehran in the winter and returned to Turkey in late April. But, she said, the apparent calm was misleading: “Everyone’s morale is terrible.”
Like most of the two dozen or so Iranians interviewed for this article, Sara declined to be fully named, fearing reprisals from the government. Others declined to be identified at all.
Sara was in Iran for some of the worst weeks of the war, and said that Iranians outside the country were more anxious about what was happening inside than those actually living there, who may be more resigned. “Everyone is hopeless, or some have hopes in something that is illusory,” she said.
For those opposed to the country’s Islamic authoritarian government, mass protests in January brought thrilling hopes of political change — only for that to curdle into grief, rage and shock as security forces killed thousands of demonstrators.
Since then, Iranians of all political persuasions have been affected by the destruction and death wrought by U.S.-Israeli airstrikes. Basic food items are increasingly difficult for even the middle classes to afford, and a continuing government-imposed internet shutdown has largely isolated the country from the outside world. Until very recently, Iranian airspace was closed to civilian flights.
And yet, people are also pursuing their passions and careers despite immense obstacles.
That was apparent from interviews at a land border crossing and train station in eastern Turkey in late April. A theater troupe came by bus, bound for Europe to rehearse a new play. A young woman with dyed magenta hair crossed the border to see a favorite band in Istanbul. And a man in his 30s came to Turkey to complete a critical step on the path to pursuing his education in Italy.
“I don’t know why Iranians are like this, but no matter what happens, even if there are high prices, still life goes on,” said Melika, 28, who was visiting Turkey with a friend and sister in late April for an exam. The three had just disembarked from a 23-hour train from Tehran to Van, in eastern Turkey, and they planned to continue on to Istanbul. “Iranians are very flexible — they adapt themselves,” she added.
During the war, she said, restaurants were packed, even as much of the economy came to a standstill. She speculated that people were choosing to enjoy the money they had, rather than bothering to save it for a car, house or other life goals.
“Now those things are out of reach for a large portion of society,” Melika said. “So they say, ‘Why should we be hard on ourselves? Let’s at least have a nice meal.’”
By contrast, Shahrzad, 57, who was boarding a train in Van to return to Iran, said she was choosing to save her money and cutting spending on unnecessary items, even though she considered herself well-off.
Shahrzad said that, during the war, bombs seemed to fall constantly — 20 to 30 a day, at all hours of the day and night. Still, she was sanguine: “We got used to it,” she said, as she chatted and joked with a man and woman waiting in line with her.
Her generation, which experienced the instabilities of the 1979 revolution and lived through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, had learned over the decades to endure upheaval, she said.
Iran’s teenagers and 20-somethings, she said, had a different approach, with far less patience for the difficulties they were experiencing, and most were opposed to the government.
“Gen Z, nobody can handle them,” she said. “We are more peace-seeking. The young people are more radical.”
Several Iranians at the border said they felt like they were at the mercy of world powers and their own government, with no agency to determine events in their own lives.
One man, a day trader who had come to Turkey to use the internet for work before returning to Iran said that people seemed to have stagnated, following the news and waiting to see what happened. He himself had little hope that things in the country would change for the better.
“I think it’s all a game,” said Sara, the woman in her 40s, when asked about the cease-fire between the United States and Iran. “We’re just being played with.”
Kiana Hayeri contributed reporting."
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