The Voting Rights Act: A Response to the recent Supreme Court Ruling

Posted to ADN May 20, 2026

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed to provide an enforcement mechanism for the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ensuring that all citizens had the right to vote. Many states had employed a number of provisions to make voting so onerous for minority (often black and indigenous) voters that they were effectively discouraged them from voting. Poll taxes, reading tests, morality tests, and many other racist items were woven into election laws. If you could keep a certain population from having a job, you could keep them from voting (Poll tax). If you cut all the funding from educating a certain population, you could keep them from voting (reading test). If you could decide a certain population was immoral, you could keep them from voting. On their faces, all were neutral. In their usage, always discriminatory. Of course, there was also blatant physical intimidation too. Where legalized discrimination failed, threat to life and limb was all too happy to step in.

The VRA got rid of these barriers to voting and passed Congress in overwhelming numbers, 333-85 in the House and 77-19 in the Senate. President Lyndon B. Johnson, of Texas, no less, signed it into law.

Now the Supreme Court is putting the final nail in the coffin of the VRA, essentially giving all enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments back to the States. States like Louisiana have immediately and blatantly proposed to disenfranchise black voters, the same way they did prior to the VRA. Gerrymandering is now en vogue. Laws against line warming are fighting back against those who would help voters brave deliberately long lines in harsh conditions.

Someday the history of the Roberts Court will be written in total. The chapters on erosion of women’s rights (Dobbs v. Jackson), legalized religious intimidation of children (Kennedy v. Bremerton), and anti-science environmental destruction (Massachusetts v. EPA) have had time for their ink to dry. Now, with Shelby County v. Holder and Louisiana v. Callais, the systemic, court-approved destruction of minority voting rights can join them.

After initial passage, Congress amended the VRA many times to expand the law’s reach, cognizant that times change, but racism remains. The fashion surrounding the racism sources itself up with the times. Sometimes the racism wears a white hood, other times a red hat. We know more often than not, it wears a tailored suit, and sometimes it finds itself wearing a jurist’s robe. We know that the spring that feeds racism is eternal, and so must be the fight against it. Civil Rights warriors of the past fought back against Chief Justice Taney and Dred Scott. Today we fight against Roberts after Louisiana v. Callais. We fought against George Wallace’s “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. We will likewise fight John Roberts, Greg Abbott, Jeff Landry, and Ron DeSantis too. Should this ugliness find its way to the Alaska governorship this fall, we will be waiting.

Until Justice Just. Is.