I am sitting in my office. I see the MSN newsfeed pop-up. The announcement is the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act. I just started shaking my head. Where in the heck is this country going? Oh my God.
That moment was Wednesday, April 29, 2026. The Supreme Court of the United States, by a vote of six to three, in Louisiana v. Callais, gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.1 Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. The dissent was sharp. The majority was quiet, technical, and devastating
Election-law scholar Richard Hasen called it “one of the worst Supreme Court rulings of the last century.” He wrote a follow-up calling Alito a “coward” for the way the opinion avoided naming what it did. What makes Callais different from other six-to-three decisions is not the vote count. It is the silence. The majority did not announce the burial of the Voting Rights Act. It buried it quietly, the way a body is buried at night, so the neighbors will not see.
What Callais Actually Did
Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. After the Supreme Court gutted Section 5’s preclearance regime in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, Section 2 became the last federal statutory tool with real enforcement teeth against racial vote dilution. The framework for proving a Section 2 violation came from Thornburg v. Gingles in 1986, which built on the rejection of intent-only standards in Mobile v. Bolden. The Gingles framework asked three threshold questions: is the minority group sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district; is it politically cohesive; and does the white majority vote sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.
Callais did not formally overrule Gingles. It did something more useful for those who wanted Gingles dead. It raised the burden of proof at every threshold step until the framework no longer functions as a remedy. Plaintiffs must now demonstrate not merely that the three Gingles preconditions are met, but that the challenged district was drawn with a level of racial intent that approaches the standard required to invalidate a law under the Equal Protection Clause. The Court did not say Section 2 is dead. It said Section 2 lives, but only when the plaintiff can prove what is almost impossible to prove.
This is the technique. The Roberts Court has refined it for thirteen years. Shelby County did not strike Section 2; it struck the preclearance formula in Section 4(b), which made Section 5 enforceable. Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 did not strike partisan gerrymandering claims; it ruled them nonjusticiable in federal court. Students for Fair Admissions did not strike the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee; it reinterpreted what the guarantee permits in the admissions context. Each ruling preserves the formal text and removes the operational tool. Callais is the same technique applied to what was left of the Voting Rights Act.
The Quiet Burial
The public has not been told what happened. Most morning news on April 29 led with other stories. Most evening cable coverage gave the decision two segments, then moved on. The headlines used the language of legal commentary: “limits Section 2,” “narrows voting rights claims,” “raises burden on plaintiffs.” None of them said what Hasen said: this is one of the worst rulings of the last century.2
Burying a thing quietly is not new. The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 quietly buried the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment did not reach private discrimination. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 quietly buried the equal-protection promise of the Reconstruction Amendments by ratifying “separate but equal.” The Compromise of 1877 quietly buried Reconstruction itself by withdrawing federal troops from the South in exchange for the presidency. Each of those quiet burials was followed by decades of harm that did not have to happen.
What Callais shares with those earlier quiet burials is the technique of formal preservation paired with operational destruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 remained on the books after 1883; it was simply unenforceable. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act remains on the books after April 29, 2026; it is simply unenforceable in the way it was meant to be enforced. The text is undisturbed. The function is gone.
The Price Never Paid
Before going further into where Callais leads, the price never paid must be named. In 1860, the assessed market value of enslaved people in the United States was approximately $3.5 billion. That figure was roughly eighty percent of the gross domestic product of the country at the time. In present-day dollars, scaled to GDP share rather than to the consumer price index, the value approached twenty-two trillion dollars. That wealth was not paid to the people whose bodies and labor produced it. It was paid to the people who claimed to own them, when it was paid at all, as in the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of April 16, 1862, which paid up to three hundred dollars per enslaved person to loyal slaveholders and nothing to the people freed.
Between 1934 and 1968, the Federal Housing Administration insured approximately $120 billion in home mortgages. Less than two percent of that volume went to non-white borrowers. In CPI-adjusted dollars, the white-only share of FHA-insured mortgage credit during those thirty-four years approaches $2.6 trillion. The gap was not the consequence of private prejudice. It was the consequence of explicit federal underwriting policy that defined Black neighborhoods as risk and refused to insure mortgages in them. Richard Rothstein documents this in The Color of Law.
15 Ira Katznelson documents the same pattern across the New Deal and the GI Bill in When Affirmative Action Was White.
The Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances reports that the typical white family held about six times the wealth of the typical Black family. The median white–Black wealth gap exceeded $220,000. This gap is not a measurement of effort, education, or willingness to work. It is a measurement of compounding the original theft and the federal exclusion that followed it. H.R. 40, the federal commission bill to study reparations proposals, was first introduced in 1989 by Representative John Conyers and has been reintroduced in every Congress since. It has not received a floor vote in the House in any of those Congresses.
Thirteen Years of Demolition
Callais is the closing argument in a thirteen-year demolition project. The opening argument was Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the preclearance formula in Section 4(b) was based on outdated data and could not be reauthorized without a current congressional finding of need.5 Congress, predictably, did not produce that finding. The preclearance regime collapsed. Within a year, jurisdictions previously covered by Section 5 began enacting the kinds of restrictions Section 5 had been designed to stop.
Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 closed the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims, shifting the contest entirely to state courts and state ballot initiatives.8 Students for Fair Admissions in 2023 closed the use of race-conscious admissions in higher education.9 Trump 47 then signed a series of executive orders that extended the demolition into the executive branch. Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” issued January 20, 2025, ordered the termination of all federal DEI offices and equity action plans. Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” issued January 21, 2025, revoked Executive Order 11246, the contractor affirmative-action order signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Executive Order 14160 attempted to redefine birthright citizenship. Executive Order 14281, “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” issued April 23, 2025, ordered the elimination of disparate-impact liability across federal civil-rights enforcement.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s February 5, 2025, memorandum to all Department of Justice employees, “Ending Illegal DEI and DEIA Discrimination and Preferences,” directed the Civil Rights Division to investigate, eliminate, and penalize private-sector and educational DEI programs, including through criminal enforcement. The Office of Personnel Management’s January 21, 202,5 memorandum to all federal department and agency heads instructed the closure of all DEIA offices by 5:00 p.m. the next day and the placement of all DEIA employees on administrative leave. On April 11, 2025, the Department of Justice terminated the 2023 environmental-justice settlement agreement with the Alabama Department of Public Health concerning raw-sewage exposure in Lowndes County, a majority-Black county in the Black Belt.
Housing enforcement followed. HUD’s March 3, 202,5 interim final rule revising Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing returned the AFFH certification to the pre-1994 self-attestation model and removed the structured planning framework grantees had used to identify and address segregation. HUD’s January 14, 20,26 proposed rule on the Fair Housing Act’s disparate-impact standard would remove the discriminatory-effects regulations entirely and leave interpretation to the courts. The Fair Housing Initiatives Program, which funded the local nonprofits that processed roughly seventy-five percent of housing-discrimination complaints in 2023, was zeroed out in the FY26 House appropriations bill, after seventy-eight FHIP grants covering thirty-three states had already been terminated by HUD on February 27, 2025. The OCC, Federal Reserve, and FDIC issued a joint notice of proposed rulemaking on July 16, 2025 to rescind the 2023 Community Reinvestment Act final rule and revert to the 1995 framework. On the immigration side, DHS published the November 28, 2025, Federal Register notice terminating Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status, effective February 3, 2026, following nearly a year of compressed termination notices.
American Banker reported in March 2026 that the administration is “turning fair-lending law on its head.” CFPB’s April 2026 final rule on the Equal Credit Opportunity Act narrows the scope of fair-lending enforcement at the agency level. Bloomberg Law’s January 2026 coverage describes a coordinated curbing of fair-lending enforcement across the federal banking agencies. These are not separate stories. They are one story. The civil-rights enforcement architecture built between the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the closing of the southern filibuster on June 10, 1964, is being dismantled at every level simultaneously. Callais closes the courthouse door. The executive orders close the agency door. The appropriations bill closes the funding door.
What This Means for the Country
I want to say plainly what this means. The federal government, between Reconstruction and the closing of the southern filibuster on June 10, 1964, was the institution that finally took up enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments. Between 1965 and 2013, the federal government enforced the Voting Rights Act with measurable results. Black voter registration in the seven states originally covered by Section 5 rose from below thirty percent in 1964 to above sixty percent by 1970. Black officeholders rose from a few hundred in 1965 to more than ten thousand by 2000. The federal government was the lever. The lever has been broken.
When the federal lever is broken, the work returns to the states, to the cities, to the counties, to the neighborhoods. State attorneys general become the front line. Independent state constitutions become the operative text. Local prosecutors become the difference between a complaint that goes forward and a complaint that disappears. Community-based fair-housing organizations become the only enforcement mechanism for tenants who are turned away because of a name on a lease application. The work that the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division did between 1957 and 2024 must now be done by people who do not have subpoena power, do not have grand-jury authority, and do not have a federal court that will hear the case on Section 2 grounds.
It can be done. It has been done before. The abolitionists who built the Underground Railroad did it without federal help. The lawyers who litigated Brown v. Board did it across two decades with limited resources and constant intimidation. The voter-registration workers in Mississippi in 1964 did it knowing some of them would be killed. They were killed. The work continued. The history of civil rights in this country is the history of people doing impossible work without the federal government and, eventually, with the federal government, and now, again, without the federal government. The cycle is not new. The recognition that the cycle has restarted is what April 29, 2026, forces.
The Architecture of the Response
The architecture of the demolition is matched by an architecture of the response. The architecture of the response begins with state attorneys general willing to use independent state-constitution authority where federal authority has been withdrawn. It continues with state and local prosecutors willing to charge civil rights violations under state law. It extends to community land trusts, community development financial institutions, and minority depository institutions willing to do the credit work that regulated banks under the rescinded CRA framework will increasingly decline. It includes historically Black colleges and universities that retain the authority to admit, teach, and credential without the post-2023 admissions constraints affecting majority-white institutions. It includes the local fair-housing organizations whose FHIP grants were terminated and who must now be funded directly by communities and philanthropy.
The architecture of the response also requires honesty about leadership. The civil-rights infrastructure of the 1940s through the 1960s produced a leadership generation matched to the moment. Tubman, Douglass, and the AME Church produced the spiritual frame. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement produced the intellectual frame. The NAACP produced the legal framework. King, Malcolm X, Garvey, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Septima Clark, and the SNCC field organizers produced the operational frame. The question that has to be asked, without sentiment, is whether the institutions that carry those names today carry the same authority. The NAACP of 1940 was not the NAACP of 1964. The NAACP of 2026 has to answer for itself.
That question is not an attack. It is a measurement. Where a leader is walking in the shoes of King today, name the leader. Where the AME Church is doing the work the AME Church did in 1860 and again in 1960, name the work. Where the historically Black law firms and law schools are training the next generation of civil-rights lawyers without federal funding to lean on, name the institution. Where the spirit of Brown v. Board lives in litigation strategy in 2026, name the case. The recognition that some of these answers are smaller in 2026 than they were in 1964 is not a counsel of despair. It is the precondition of building what is needed now.
The Closing Question
We need the spirit of Harriet Tubman. We need the spirit of John Brown. We need the spirit of Frederick Douglass, who pushed for African Americans to fight for our own freedom, and was answered by the two hundred thousand Black soldiers who fought in the Union Army. We need the spirit of the AME Church. We need the spirit of Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and who delivered the Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. We need the spirit of April 9, 1865, when the war ended, and slavery was abolished, and the Union victory marked a rebirth of America. We need a rebirth today. We need a leader who can bring us together and not tear us apart.
Poetry says the rest: https://thepowerisnow.com/the-end-of-an-era-part-one-callais-and-the-quiet-burial-of-the-voting-rights-act-poem/
References & Footnotes: https://thepowerisnow.com/the-end-of-an-era-part-one-footnotes/
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