The Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Prepare for maximum gerrymandering.

Get yourself a man who loves you as much as Justice Samuel Alito loves partisan gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which was handed down on Wednesday, was expected to deal a mortal blow to a longstanding federal rule that guarantees Black and Latino voters a minimum level of representation in some states, and Alito’s majority opinion in Callais unquestionably deals such a blow.

But Alito, whose opinion was joined only by the Court’s Republicans, also goes much further. Callais is a cry of devotion to the idea that state lawmakers should be allowed to draw legislative maps that benefit their own political party, and that lock the opposing party out of power to the maximum extent possible.

Callais’s immediate effect is that it removes what was, until Wednesday morning, one of the few remaining federal legal checks on gerrymandering: the Voting Rights Act’s provision governing racial gerrymanders. Prior to Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act sometimes required states to draw additional legislative districts where a racial minority group is in the majority. Callais effectively neutralizes that provision. It does so in two ways.

First, Alito’s opinion effectively reinstates City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), which held that plaintiffs alleging that a state law violates the Voting Rights Act must show that the state legislature acted with “racially discriminatory motivation.” Congress repudiated Mobile in a 1982 amendment to the VRA, which clarified that a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” may violate federal law even if state lawmakers did not enact it with racist intent.

Though Alito denies that his opinion effectively repeals this 1982 law, his opinion rests on a fairly meaningless distinction. Though he claims that Callais “does not demand a finding of intentional discrimination,” he then writes that the VRA “imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” So the new rule is really the same as Mobile, albeit with the words “strong inference” tossed in.

Alito then makes an even deeper cut at anti-gerrymandering lawsuits, elevating the principle that states must be allowed to engage in partisan gerrymandering to a trump card that overcomes the VRA’s safeguards against racial gerrymanders.

Before Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act cast a particularly skeptical eye on legislative maps drawn in states where voters are racially polarized — typically meaning that white voters overwhelmingly supported Republicans while non-white voters voted for Democrats. Without the VRA, these states would tend to give racial minorities minimal representation because the white Republican majority could use race as a proxy to identify Democrats. And then it could draw maps that gave these non-white Democrats few seats in the state legislature or Congress.

But Callais demands that VRA plaintiffs “must ‘disentangle race from politics’ by proving ‘that the former drove a district’s lines.” Thus, if a state draws a map that does two things at once, minimizing both Black representation and Democratic representation, the map will almost certainly be upheld because it is exceedingly difficult to prove that the purpose of the map is to target Black voters and not Democratic voters.

As a practical matter, this means that states with racially polarized electorates will almost always be immune from racial gerrymandering suits, because they can defend against those suits merely by proving that their state’s maps were drawn to benefit the Republican Party.

Moreover, Alito handed this decision down in April, despite the fact that the Court’s most contentious cases are typically handed down in late June. That gives Republicans in red states that previously had to comply with the Voting Rights Act an additional two months to draw congressional maps that benefit their party. And even if those states do not redraw their maps for the 2026 election, many are all but certain to do so for future elections.

Callais, in other words, is a major victory for Alito’s Republican Party, and it is an even greater victory for the proposition that gerrymandering should flourish without federal regulation.

Broadly speaking, state lawmakers can draw gerrymandered maps in two ways. One way, known as “racial” gerrymandering, occurs when a state draws a map in order to maximize the power of voters of one race, and to minimize the power of voters of another race. Imagine, for example, a map that crammed all of a state’s Black voters into a single congressional district, while spreading out white voters to more efficiently elect as many white candidates as possible.

“Partisan” gerrymanders, meanwhile, occur when a state draws maps that try to maximize one party’s representation and minimize the power of the other major party.

In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican majority held that federal courts may not hear challenges to partisan gerrymanders. But the Voting Rights Act, as it was amended in 1982, still sometimes prohibited maps that dilute racial minorities’ voting strength. Recall that the amended VRA prohibits a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” A racial gerrymander abridges the right to vote by making votes cast by voters of one race matter less than votes cast by members of a different race.

The Court laid out this pre-Callais framework in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). While the Gingles framework is complicated, it primarily turned on two questions: 1) whether a state is residentially segregated by race; and 2) whether the states’ voters are racially polarized by political party.

Gingles recognized that, when residential segregation and racial polarization coexist, they produce two separate political communities who will consistently vote for opposing candidates — for example, white voters who vote for Republicans in one part of a state, and Black voters who vote for Democrats in another part of it. In such a state, the majority community will use its control of the state legislature to draw maps that leave the minority community with little, if any, representation. And so the VRA sometimes required these states to draw additional districts where a racial minority group was in the majority, in order to ensure that group was not unfairly denied representation.

Although Alito claims that his Callais opinion “does not require abandonment of the Gingles framework,” he’s not telling the truth. Gingles was the Court’s attempt to apply the 1982 VRA amendment’s command that a law which “results” in less representation for racial minorities is suspect. But, by reviving Mobile’s racist intent requirement, Alito effectively repeals the 1982 amendment — at least as it applies to redistricting cases.

On top of that, Alito’s Callais opinion turns Gingles on its head. Again, Gingles held that, because states that are racially polarized tend to produce unfair maps, those states sometimes had special obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Callais, by contrast, holds that racially polarized states enjoy enhanced protections against being sued for racial gerrymandering.

Under Callais, a state that is accused of racial gerrymandering may defend against that suit by demonstrating that its maps also benefit the political party that controls the state legislature. So the most racially polarized states will enjoy the highest level of immunity from lawsuits challenging their maps.

The most immediate impact of this decision is that red states that previously were bound by the Voting Rights Act are now free to redraw their maps to maximize Republican representation. As recently as 2023, for example, the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to draw an additional Black majority district in order to comply with the VRA. Alabama may now eliminate this district so long as it claims that it is doing so for partisan reasons, and not racial ones.

More broadly, Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering that it is likely to eliminate any remaining concerns political parties may have that the Supreme Court might push back if states draw maps too obviously rigged in their favor. Rucho already established that partisan gerrymandering is allowed. Callais effectively rules that racial gerrymandering is also allowed, so long as it also achieves partisan ends.

A less certain question is what happens to Black representation over the course of the next several decades. Callais will allow Republican state lawmakers to eliminate many congressional seats that are currently held by Black or Latino lawmakers and replace them with white Republican districts. One upshot is that many minority voters will now need to form coalitions with white voters in order to elect their preferred candidates. It remains to be seen whether such alliances will form in the future.

Unless and until that happens, however, Callais will increase the power of white Republicans and diminish the power of Democrats and voters of color generally. The gerrymandering wars are only beginning, and the Republican Party just gained a powerful new weapon.