The Voting Rights Act is dead. The law, very likely the most consequential civil rights statute Congress has ever passed, died on April 29, 2026. It was not a natural death. Congress did not repeal it, having concluded, for example, that it was no longer needed. On the contrary, Congress has reauthorized the statute four times since its initial passage in 1965, and has only expanded, not narrowed its scope. The perpetrator was instead the Supreme Court—or, more accurately, its six Republican-appointed members. In a deeply disingenuous decision, Justice Samuel Alito claimed only to be “updating” the statute. In fact the Court radically rewrote the law to eliminate the protections it has long secured for minority voters throughout the nation. The decision in Louisiana v. Callais may be the Roberts Court’s most radical and far-reaching yet, rivaled only by the 2022 elimination of the right to abortion. It will almost certainly usher in a bleaching of the nation’s legislative bodies—federal, state, and local—unlike anything this country has seen since the “Redemption” of 1873–1877 ended Reconstruction …