In Louisiana v. Callais, the Roberts Court has continued its war on civil rights in the name of civil rights. The cynicism of the 6-3 majority decision in Callais is staggering. According to the majority decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the long-standing interpretation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, requiring minorities to have opportunities to have representation in rough proportion to their population, has been overtaken by events.

What has changed? Nothing, except Alito’s ability to cobble together a majority based on his disingenuous claim that this ruling is merely an “update.” As recently as the Court’s 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh voted to uphold a lower-court order requiring an additional majority-minority district in Alabama. This was in line with an earlier precedent in the Court’s 1986 ruling in Thornburg v. Gingles, which overturned a North Carolina districting plan on the ground that it diluted Black voting strength.

The Wall Street Journal, in a deeply cynical editorial titled “A Victory for Voting Rights at the Supreme Court,” congratulated Alito on his ploy. “Justice Alito’s ‘update’ on Gingles tiptoes around those two precedents to get those votes [of Kavanaugh and Roberts],” the Journal wrote.

John Roberts has long sought to dilute Black voting strength, first as a staffer in the Reagan administration and then in prior Court rulings eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, notably in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act for jurisdictions with a history of discrimination. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her scathing dissent, “Today’s ruling is part of a set: For over a decade, this Court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act.”

Roberts’s claim, echoed by Alito in Callais, is that so much progress has been made on race that the Constitution no longer permits race-conscious remedies. But if that is the case, it is mainly thanks to the civil rights laws that the Court is now gutting.