Said Johns Hopkins historian Martha Jones: "To think of the Voting Rights Act as an act of Congress — or an act of Johnson's pen — is to in essence erase the blood from the page. And there is a lot of blood in that story." The Supreme Court just wrote over that page.
On April 29, 2026, the Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais — split along ideological lines — that majority-Black Congressional districts drawn on racial grounds are unconstitutional under the Voting Rights Act. Justice Alito's majority opinion holds that race-conscious maps are forbidden; partisan maps are fine. Within days, Tennessee's Republican governor signed a new map widely criticized for diluting Black voting power. Florida and Virginia are already redrawing. The 2026 House map is being redrawn in real time.
The last time the Court systematically dismantled federal voting protections built on Reconstruction-era amendments, the result was 90 years of Jim Crow. The 15th Amendment passed in 1870 to guarantee Black men the right to vote. It took until 1965 — after Selma, after Bloody Sunday, after John Lewis's skull was fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge — before Congress gave that guarantee actual teeth. The Roberts Court has now spent 15 years sawing those teeth out: Shelby County v. Holder (2013) gutted preclearance; Brnovich v. DNC (2021) narrowed Section 2; Louisiana v. Callais finishes the work. Each ruling, taken alone, sounds technical. The arc is not technical.
Congressman Cleo Fields of Louisiana — whose own district is directly in the ruling's crosshairs — put it plainly: "The real issue is whether or not a person who looks like me will have the opportunity to serve in Congress." Ranking Judiciary Member Jamie Raskin went further: "They've basically said it's unconstitutional to deliberately create a majority African-American, or majority Hispanic, district, although you can create all the majority White districts you want. That's just considered the norm." If that norm holds through the 2026 cycle, the downstream effect on House composition — and on which party controls it — is not speculative. It is the point.
Three things to track before November 2026: (1) Whether any of the newly redrawn state maps — Tennessee's is already signed — face successful emergency injunctions. (2) Whether Congress moves to restore preclearance authority under the 14th Amendment's enforcement clause, which Shelby County left intact as a legal pathway. (3) The November returns themselves: if Black representation in the House drops, the historical record Jones is describing gets written in election results, not just law reviews.
Article I
American politics through the lens of the Constitution and the long memory.
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