The court has fast-tracked its decision demolishing the VRA, helping southern states redraw their maps before the midterms.
Supporters of voting rights hold signs outside the U.S. Supreme Court on October 15, 2025.(Celal Gunes / Anadolu via Getty Images)
People say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but the Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority has shown time and again that it can act with great alacrity when it wants to crush the civil and political rights of Black citizens. When the court wants to participate in some racism, it can move like Sonic the damn Hedgehog.
The Supreme Court accelerated to ramming speed yesterday when it decided to forgo its normal procedures and fast track its April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively demolished the Voting Rights Act. Normally, the court waits 32 days after issuing an opinion before finalizing its ruling by submitting it to the lower courts. This waiting period exists so that losing litigants can ask the court to reconsider its ruling—and, in theory at least, the court will do just that.
But In Louisiana v. Callais, the winning litigants—the white people who argued that the Voting Rights Act took away their whites-only constitutional right to be overrepresented in Congress—asked the court to do away with this waiting period and finalize the decision immediately. The reason has to do with the fast-approaching midterm elections—and the primaries for those midterms, which are due to start this month. If the litigants want to get new racist maps in place before the election, time is of the essence.
To help jump-start the process of eliminating Black political power, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry has called off the state’s Congressional primaries and is trying to speedily redraw Louisiana’s map so that it consists only of white districts. But he can’t legally push forward a new map until the Supreme Court’s decision to get rid of the old one is final. (It’s worth noting that this is happening all over the South. Confederate state after Confederate state is trying to redraw its maps to erase Black voting districts as quickly as possible.)
The fast-tracking request is ironic, because if there ever was a time for the Supreme Court to reconsider one of its opinions, it would surely be when white folks interpret that opinion as license to reinstitute Jim Crow. When you issue a ruling that immediately makes white people try to eliminate the Congressional Black Caucus, it may be worth taking a month to consider if this is really where you want the country to go.
But instead of actually using the waiting period as it was intended, the Republican supermajority issued an unsigned, one-paragraph order getting rid of the waiting period. In addition, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) saw fit to write a concurring opinion, in which he explained that keeping the waiting period in place “would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional.”
This is rich coming from Alito and his fellow conservatives. That’s because, just a few years ago, they did in fact “require” a state to hold a Congressional election using a map that was unconstitutional. It’s just that the map was an unconstitutional violation of Black voting rights, so the Republicans were cool with getting at least one more election out of it.
That case was called Allen v. Milligan and it involved a racist map in Alabama. In February of 2022, the court ruled that Alabama’s congressional map was likely a violation of the Constitution, but the Republicans on the court said that they were too close to the 2022 midterm elections to force Alabama to do anything about it. The court cited what’s known as the Purcell Principle, which maintains that changes to the structure of an election cannot be made too close to the actual election. How close is too close? Well, apparently, February is too close to restore Black voting rights, but May is fine if you’re going to take them away.
In dissent in this latest round of Callais, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out the Republicans for using their judicial power to pick winners and losers in the upcoming elections. She wrote: “Louisiana’s hurried response to the Callais decision unfolds in the midst of an ongoing statewide election, against the backdrop of a pitched redistricting battle among state governments that appear to be acting as proxies for their favored political parties. And as always, the Court has a choice. By my count, we have granted an application to issue the judgment forthwith over a party’s objection only twice in the last 25 years. To avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures.”
Alito (and Thomas and Gorsuch apparently) were offended by Jackson’s dissent, and said so. That’s not surprising: one thing I’ve learned is that racists don’t like being called racist when they are doing something racist. To get the full measure of Alito’s objection, I suggest you read this in your best “Karen” voice: “The dissent goes on to claim that our decision represents an unprincipled use of power. That is a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge. What principle has the Court violated? The principle that Rule 45.3’s 32-day default period should never be shortened even when there is good reason to do so? The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan?”
I will go to my grave believing that the word “uppity” was somewhere in Alito’s draft but one of his clerks did his boss a solid and deleted it.
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The upshot of this ruling is that Louisiana will almost certainly be able to redistrict away all of its majority-minority districts before the 2026 midterms, and the court might well let all of the southern states do the same. I initially thought that the court would stop redistricting efforts that weren’t already underway before Callais because of the Purcell Principle, but now I think that I was wrong. This court wants to take away Black voting rights now, not in 2028, not in 2030 after the next census—now.
I can only hope that the glee with which Republicans are trying to reinstitute Jim Crow will backfire, that Black voters and whites of good conscience will reject these efforts with the kind of overwhelming turnout that will frustrate the white supremacists’ gerrymanders.
But, that’s a fool’s hope. The Supreme Court got rid of the Voting Rights Act because the act worked. Racists have been chomping at the bit to get rid of Black representatives for two generations, and now that they finally have their chance they are taking it. Republicans cannot keep control of the House in a fair election, so Republicans have no intention of allowing a fair election to happen.
Elie MystalTwitterElie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and a columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution and Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, both published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie v. U.S.” here.