What a happy coincidence for House Republicans that the Supreme Court's conservative bloc found an excuse to help preserve their party's congressional majority, just in time for the 2026 midterm elections. Without the timely intervention of the right-wing justices, a Democratic wave loomed over the White House and Capitol Hill — which threatened not only the plans of the Trump administration but the corrupt conduct of the high court itself.

Masterminded by Chief Justice John Roberts and written by his ideological sidekick Justice Samuel Alito, last week's decision in Louisiana v. Callais not only eviscerated the last remaining protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act but immediately propelled a fresh wave of partisan redistricting across the South. This was the entirely predictable result of a series of Supreme Court decisions that have undermined racial equality while encouraging white-majority legislatures to redraw congressional maps as a means to ensure perpetual power for the GOP.

And all this was done with self-righteous zeal in the name of "racial neutrality," good government and Constitutional jurisprudence.

The court's critics have noted how little remains of those traditional values after two decades of the Roberts court. Since the majority overturned Roe v. Wade, women saw yet another step in the diminution of their control over their own bodies and health, an attack on their autonomy that is already costing innocent lives in the most backward states. Now in Callais, Black and Latino Americans see the razing of minority political power in the most segregated regions and the return of Jim Crow, delivered by a party that countenances unabashed racism in its ranks.

Alito's justification for abandoning decades of precedent — and the clear textual purpose of the Voting Rights Act — made little logical sense. Rather than determining whether a state's congressional district map imposed the effect of a racial hierarchy on state voters, he ruled, the court would demand proof of racist intent on the part of legislators who drew that map. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, the impossibility of knowing or proving what was in the minds of those legislators is obvious. It is also a completely invented standard.