John Roberts has spent his entire career trying to kill the Voting Rights Act. And in late April, the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority realized that goal by effectively dismantling the VRA in the Louisiana v. Callais decision.
But the roots of the Callais decision go much deeper, as we write in our new cover story for Mother Jones, to one of the darkest periods of US history. Its logic for shredding the country’s most important civil rights law replicates the worst impulses of the Supreme Court in the 19th century.
By destroying the Voting Rights Act and gutting the 14th and 15th amendments, the Roberts Court is recycling legal arguments once advanced by Confederates and white supremacists to destroy Reconstruction, America’s brief and fleeting experiment with multiracial democracy. The Callais decision has startling parallels with three cases from Louisiana that ended Reconstruction and enshrined Jim Crow, including Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous ruling that established “separate but equal.”
Exactly 130 years later, the Roberts Court has revived the idea that the law should play no role in bringing about racial equality. The Callais decision could trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction and is already shaping the midterms by imperiling majority-Black districts across the South.
The court’s willingness to use the 14th Amendment to emancipate white people from Black elected officials—but not to help Black people elect officials—signals its fundamentally racist priorities. This is a new form of Jim Crow.
—Ari Berman and Pema Levy
