The Supreme Court issues a horrible decision on Voting Rights Act

When the Supreme Court says ending Jim Crow is a constitutional violation, the message is clear: Nothing goes too far if it will kill Black political power.

Today, conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the core enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act, the law that ended Jim Crow, removing the last legal pretense of protected Black voting rights in America.

The VRA was passed because Black Americans had the right to vote on paper and no ability to exercise it in practice. The conservative majority has resurrected that exact arrangement, just with updated legal language.

My own grandmother was born in 1936 and didn’t have a real vote until the VRA passed. She is still alive and this court has moved us close enough to that world that I have to consider whether she may see it return in her lifetime.

This decision won’t stay confined to the U.S. House. Voter suppression rots outward, into state legislatures, city councils, and school boards. It shapes whose children get funded schools, whose neighborhoods get policed differently, whose health outcomes get ignored by the officials who could change them.

And history tells us who’s next. Black voters were the first racial minority to win the vote, and that door opened for others. The reversal will move in the same order, but we shouldn’t be deterred.

Now is the moment we get serious about 2030. Every state legislative chamber, every governorship on the ballot between now and then is a redistricting vote. Vote Save America is committed to electing people who understand that race and ethnicity are not incidental to democracy, but the measure of its success, and we won’t stop fighting for that vision.

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