Callais Affects More Than Just Congress

Chief Justice John Roberts and his far-right Supreme Court has finally achieved their decades-old goal to kill the Voting Rights Act. One of the most significant, federal legislative achievements of the civil rights era, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is often marked as the true starting point of multiracial democracy in the United States by providing Black and other historically-marginalized communities across the country equal access to all aspects of the political process. From the beginning, Republicans have sought to roll back the law’s protections, and with Roberts’ elevation to Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the movement to kill the VRA achieved its most important judicial nomination in decades.

Before the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court had already spent decades weakening the Voting Rights Act’s core protections. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits voting practices or district maps that discriminate on the basis of race and allows voters to challenge discriminatory laws in court, while Section 5 required jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing voting laws or procedures. In Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts authored the decision dismantling the preclearance system that had blocked thousands of discriminatory voting changes, pointing to Section 2 as preventing any ongoing issues. But then the Court further narrowed the VRA in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee by making Section 2 claims harder to win, limiting one of the last remaining tools available to challenge racially discriminatory voting laws. Now, with Callais, the Roberts Court has effectively finished the job.

Most attention surrounding Callais has focused on congressional maps, particularly in Louisiana and other Southern states where Black voters have successfully challenged racially discriminatory district lines since the passage of the VRA. But the decision will have effects up and down the ballot, including for races as consequential as for state supreme courts. State courts hear 95 percent of all civil and criminal cases, on issues ranging from reproductive rights and voting access to environmental regulation, labor protections, and criminal sentencing. State supreme courts have become among the most politically significant institutions in American life. Republicans in particular have spent years investing in judicial races across the states, recognizing that state courts shape policy long before disputes ever reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Unlike many states, Mississippi elects its supreme court justices from geographic districts rather than statewide elections. For years, civil rights groups argued that the state’s judicial map diluted Black voting power by splitting the heavily Black Delta region across multiple districts, making it nearly impossible for Black voters to elect their preferred candidates. Although Black Mississippians make up nearly 40 percent of the state population, only four Black justices have ever served on the state supreme court.

Last year, a federal judge agreed that the districts violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In White v. Mississippi State Board of Elections, Judge Sharion Aycock ordered Mississippi to redraw its supreme court districts, finding that the state’s existing maps unlawfully diluted Black voting strength. The ruling was a direct recognition that voting rights protections extend not only to legislatures and Congress, but to the judiciary itself. Then came the Callais decision.

In Callais, the Supreme Court sharply limited plaintiffs’ ability to bring race-conscious redistricting claims under Section 2, holding that courts must give far greater deference to states accused of racial vote dilution while casting suspicion on maps drawn with the explicit purpose of complying with the Voting Rights Act. After the ruling, Mississippi officials moved quickly to avoid complying with Aycock’s order by calling a special legislative session to redraw the state’s supreme court districts before the next round of judicial elections. Just weeks later, the Fifth Circuit relied on Callais to block the lower court’s remedy and invalidate the decision requiring new supreme court district maps in Mississippi. The ruling effectively ended one of the most significant recent attempts to use Section 2 to challenge racially discriminatory judicial districts, signaling that the collapse of the VRA will not stop at congressional representation but will extend deep into the structure of state courts and other local offices themselves. 

Many of these judicial election systems were already vulnerable to racial vote dilution challenges. In states where judges are elected from districts, weakening Section 2 protections may allow legislatures to engineer judicial maps that preserve partisan and racial power indefinitely. And because judicial elections often receive less public scrutiny than congressional races, these changes may occur with comparatively little national attention.

Mississippi’s Supreme Court District 1 illustrates the stakes. The district has historically produced relatively competitive elections despite Mississippi’s broader Republican lean. A redraw centered around Republican interests rather than VRA compliance could significantly alter the ideological trajectory of the court for years.

This is precisely why Roberts’ decades-long campaign against the VRA mattered so much. Through the combination of Shelby County, Brnovich, and Callais, the Supreme Court has systematically dismantled the federal government’s ability to meaningfully police racial discrimination in democratic structures. The Court’s recent shadow docket intervention in Allen v. Milligan—where it allowed Alabama to use a map previously determined to be an intentional racial gerrymander—underscored how far the conservative majority is willing to go to preserve Republican electoral advantage. Section 2 remains on the books, but unless plaintiffs can provide smoking gun evidence of racial discrimination, it is unlikely for even extreme gerrymanders to be successfully challenged. Under this formulation, the Court has shifted the power to structure political representation decisively back to partisan state legislatures—precisely the actors the VRA was designed to constrain.

The implications are especially stark in judicial elections, where the mechanics of democracy are least visible but the stakes are often highest. State judges’ decisions already receive relatively little public scrutiny, and many voters struggle to evaluate judicial candidates. But even when voters are more educated and engaged in judicial elections, they are also increasingly shaped upstream by district design and electoral rules that determine who can realistically compete for seats. If those systems are insulated from meaningful VRA review, the composition of state courts becomes less a reflection of political communities and more a product of legislative  choices made behind closed doors, with disastrous effects for the people of the state.

That is the end state Roberts’ jurisprudence has been moving toward for years: a constitutional order where formal equality in voting law masks a growing asymmetry in political power. The Voting Rights Act did not disappear in a single decision. It was dismantled incrementally, through doctrines that narrowed its reach while expanding the discretion of those it was meant to restrain. With Callais, that project reaches its logical conclusion—not the abolition of voting rights enforcement, but its transformation into something too weak to meaningfully interrupt the systems it was created to change.

Featured image is Supreme Court of Mississippi, by Kenneth C. Zirkel