The Justices Acted as Partisans in the Voting Rights Ruling

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The Editorial Board

The Supreme Court Just Erased What Was Left of the Voting Rights Act

April 29, 2026,

6:57 p.m. ET

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Damon Winter/The New York Times

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The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday on the Voting Rights Act is a mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach. Six conservative justices voted to weaken the act, in that way substituting their own judgment for that of Congress, which reauthorized the law 20 years ago with overwhelming bipartisan support, including a unanimous vote in the Senate. With this ruling, the court has acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges.

Justice Elena Kagan, voting in the minority, struck the right tone: “I dissent because Congress elected otherwise,” she wrote. “I dissent because the court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote.”

The effects

will be significant

. The ruling, in Louisiana v. Callais, makes it easier for states to draw districts for Congress, state legislatures and local councils that elect the candidates favored by white voting blocs. The officials who make the maps no longer need to worry much about whether they are sprinkling Black voters across many districts and eliminating majority Black districts.

The reality is that in the name of disentangling race from politics, the Supreme Court has given white voters more power at the expense of racial minorities.

We recognize that people of different races now vote more similarly than they once did. That is promising. But racially polarized voting

remains common

in much of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, where Black voters lean heavily Democratic and white voters heavily Republican. Because the Supreme Court has previously allowed partisan gerrymandering, those states will be free to draw districts that elect candidates whom only a small percentage of Black voters support. Those politicians are also likely to be white.

It is impossible not to notice the partisan nature of the ruling. The six justices in the majority are the six nominated by Republican presidents, and they have likely made it easier for the party that chose them to hold power in Congress. Wednesday’s decision may

shift nine seats

in Southern states from Democratic to Republican hands, some

in the 2026 cycle

and more in years to come. State legislatures and local bodies will surely tilt in the same direction.

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