The Reasons Why — The Truth Matters, Now More Than Ever

⚖ The Captured Court: How SCOTUS Killed the Voting Rights Act — and Who Paid For It

On April 29, 2026, six justices of the United States Supreme Court completed a project nearly two decades in the making. In Louisiana v. Callais, by a 6–3 vote along ideological lines, they gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the last meaningful federal protection against racial discrimination in voting that the Court itself had not already destroyed. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, the ruling “threatens a half-century's worth of gains in voting equality” and renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” This is the story of how the Voting Rights Act was killed — the court that killed it, the doctrine they used to do it, and the billionaires who, the public record now shows, were bankrolling the lifestyles of two of the justices casting the deciding votes.

📜 What the Voting Rights Act Was — And Why It Mattered

To understand what the Court has done, you have to understand what the Voting Rights Act actually accomplished. It was the single most successful piece of civil rights legislation in American history. Then the Court took it apart.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in the wake of Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, after a century of poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, and Klan violence had effectively kept Black Americans — particularly in the South — from voting. Congress reauthorized it five separate times, with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. President George W. Bush signed the most recent 25-year extension in 2006, after the Senate voted to renew it 98–0. (Rock the Vote / Brennan Center)
Section 5 required nine states and parts of six others — jurisdictions with documented histories of racist voter suppression — to obtain federal “preclearance” from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing any voting law or practice. For nearly 50 years, this preclearance system blocked thousands of discriminatory voting changes before they could take effect. (Voting Rights Lab / NAACP LDF)
Section 2 was a permanent, nationwide ban on any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race or color.” Crucially, Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 to require only proof of discriminatory effect — not proof of discriminatory intent — because intent was nearly impossible to prove when states deliberately hid their motives behind race-neutral language. (EJI / Brennan Center)
The results were transformational. In 1979–1981, only 18 Black members of Congress served. By the 119th Congress (2025–2027), there were 65 Black representatives and 5 Black senators. Nationwide, the number of Black elected officials surged from 1,469 in 1970 to more than 10,000 today. (EJI)
This was not a relic of the past. The 14th and 15th Amendments give Congress explicit power to enforce racial equality in voting. Five separate Congresses, three Republican Presidents, and federal courts at every level had upheld the Voting Rights Act for half a century. The only institution that decided this had to end was the Supreme Court.

Sources: Brennan Center for Justice • Equal Justice Initiative • Voting Rights Lab • NAACP Legal Defense Fund

🌤 2013 — Shelby County v. Holder: Killing Preclearance

The Court's project to dismantle the Voting Rights Act began in earnest in 2013. The vehicle was a lawsuit brought by Shelby County, Alabama — one of the very jurisdictions whose history of racial voter suppression had earned it federal preclearance in the first place.

On June 25, 2013, in a 5–4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court struck down Section 4(b) — the formula that determined which jurisdictions were subject to Section 5 preclearance. Without the formula, Section 5 was rendered toothless overnight. Roberts joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito. (Justia / Constitution Center)
Roberts's reasoning was extraordinary. He acknowledged in the opinion that “voting discrimination still exists; no one doubts that.” But he said the preclearance formula was based on data that was “decades old” and the country had “changed.” (Constitution Center)
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent eviscerated this logic. Her now-famous line: throwing out preclearance because there was less voting discrimination than in 1965 was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” (Voting Rights Lab)
The proof came swift. Within 24 hours of the Shelby ruling, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo-ID law that the DOJ had previously blocked under preclearance. Within five years, 15 states — many formerly covered — passed laws restricting voting access: shorter early-voting periods, voter-roll purges, ended same-day registration, ended Sunday voting, ended pre-registration of 17-year-olds. (Constitution Center / Wikipedia)
The Brennan Center documented the result: by 2020, the “racial turnout gap” between white and non-white voters had grown so large that 9 million more ballots would have been cast had it not existed — more than Joe Biden's 7-million-vote popular margin in 2020. In 32 states, the “uncast” ballots from this turnout gap exceeded the winning candidate's margin. (Wikipedia, citing Brennan Center 2024 study)
Justice Clarence Thomas, the only Black justice on the Court, joined the majority and wrote separately to argue that the majority had not gone far enough. He wanted Section 5 itself struck down. He had argued the same thing four years earlier in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder (2009), where he was the lone dissenter from an 8–1 majority that left Section 5 standing. (Harvard Law / SCOTUSblog)

Sources: Justia — Shelby County v. Holder • Constitution Center • Shelby County Record • Harvard Law (Ogletree)

🚫 2026 — Louisiana v. Callais: Killing Section 2

With Section 5 dead, only Section 2 remained — the part of the law that lets voters of color sue over racially discriminatory maps after the fact. On April 29, 2026, the Roberts Court finished the job.

The case began with Louisiana's 2022 congressional map. Black Louisianans make up roughly one-third of the state's population, but the legislature drew only one majority-Black district out of six. A federal court found this likely violated Section 2 and ordered a redrawing. Louisiana drew a new map with two majority-Black districts — resulting in the election of two Black members of Congress from Louisiana for the first time in state history. (Campaign Legal Center / NAACP LDF)
A group of self-described “non-Black” voters then sued, claiming the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court took the case — and then made the rare move of ordering it reargued the following term, on the narrower question of whether complying with Section 2 itself was unconstitutional. (Wikipedia / NAACP LDF)
The 6–3 ruling, decided April 29, 2026, struck down Louisiana's map. Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett in the majority. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson in dissent. (SCOTUS opinion 24-109)
The majority did not formally declare Section 2 unconstitutional. Instead, it did something almost as effective: it rewrote the legal test so that Black voters challenging discriminatory maps must now prove the state acted with racially discriminatory intent, and must do so without relying on a state's history of discrimination as evidence. As the Brennan Center concluded, the ruling “essentially completes the Court's decades-long project to destroy the Voting Rights Act.” (EJI / Brennan Center)
Justice Kagan's dissent: “Today's decision threatens a half-century's worth of gains in voting equality… The Court has rendered Section 2 all but a dead letter.”
The political consequences are immediate. The New York Times estimated that without an enforceable Section 2, up to 12 House seats across southern states could flip from Democratic-leaning to Republican-leaning. Texas, with Trump's open backing, had already begun a mid-decade racial gerrymander in mid-2025 in anticipation of this ruling. The day after the decision, Louisiana suspended its May 16 primary — with mail ballots already sent to overseas voters — to give the legislature time to redraw a now-discriminatory map. (Wikipedia)
The Campaign Legal Center summed up what the ruling actually did: “The Court has made it clear that racial discrimination will be allowed so long as it is done under the guise of partisanship.”

Sources: Louisiana v. Callais (24-109) • Equal Justice Initiative • Campaign Legal Center • NAACP Legal Defense Fund • Callais Case Record

🎨 The Doctrine: Pretending Racism Doesn't Exist Is Itself the Racism

The intellectual scaffolding for gutting the Voting Rights Act is what conservative justices call the “colorblind Constitution.” Stripped of the language, what it actually means is this: the Constitution forbids government from noticing racism in order to remedy it — even when the government doing the noticing is Congress, even when the discrimination being remedied has been documented for centuries, even when the rule being challenged is one Congress passed by 98–0 to address it. Civil rights advocates call it “sophisticated denial.” The Court calls it “equal protection.”

The lead voice of this doctrine on the bench has been Justice Clarence Thomas — the only sitting Black justice when Section 5 was struck down, the only sitting Black justice when affirmative action was struck down, and one of the two Black justices when Section 2 was gutted. In every one of those cases, he voted to end the protection. (FRONTLINE / NBC News)
In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), Thomas read his concurring opinion aloud from the bench — a rarity reserved for cases a justice considers historic. He wrote 58 pages declaring that “all forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution.” (NBC News / The Hill)
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the third Black justice in the Court's history, responded with what NBC News called a “bitter” dissent: “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all' by legal fiat.” (NBC News)
Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the quiet part out loud: “The idea that the Constitution or the country itself is colorblind is farcical. Race and the subjugation of Black and Indigenous people especially are part of the legal underpinnings of our society and persist today.” (NBC News)
Doug Kendall, founder of the Constitutional Accountability Center, called Thomas a “faux originalist” who ignored the actual intent of the 14th Amendment's framers — the Reconstruction lawmakers who wrote it specifically to address the legacy of slavery and were, in his words, “the first proponents of affirmative action.” (Constitutional Accountability Center)
Charles Ogletree, the late Harvard Law professor, on Thomas's lone 2009 dissent calling Section 5 unnecessary: “When we consider the history of recent elections… his suggestion that protection of voting rights is now unnecessary is utterly breathtaking.” (Harvard Law)
The NAACP, after Callais, was blunt: “The John Roberts Court has now declared that racism in American politics is no more. Despite the recent behavior in Texas and North Carolina, Wednesday's cruel Callais decision pretends that Jim Crow is a bygone era and not this week's news… This is how authoritarianism is imposed: through incremental decisions that remove democracy's guardrails.” (MSNBC opinion)

Sources: NBC News • PBS FRONTLINE • Constitutional Accountability Center • MSNBC Opinion

💰 The Money: How the Justices Were Bought

None of the above would be quite as damning if the conservative majority on this Court were the sober jurists they claim to be — cloistered, self-denying, beyond the reach of influence. They are not. ProPublica's investigations, beginning in 2023, have documented one of the largest judicial ethics scandals in American history. The justices who killed the Voting Rights Act were, simultaneously, accepting millions of dollars in luxury gifts from the very billionaires funding the conservative legal movement that brought these cases.

Clarence Thomas — Harlan Crow. ProPublica documented that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Dallas billionaire and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow virtually every year for more than two decades without disclosing any of it. The list includes private jet flights, international superyacht cruises, week-long stays at Crow's private Adirondacks resort, and a 2019 nine-day Indonesian island cruise that could have cost more than $500,000 if Thomas had paid for it himself. (ProPublica, April 2023)
The real estate deal. In 2014, Crow purchased the home where Thomas's mother lives — a transaction Thomas did not disclose for nearly a decade, in apparent violation of the Ethics in Government Act. Crow then poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. (ProPublica)
The school tuition. Crow paid private boarding school tuition for Thomas's grandnephew — whom Thomas was raising as a son — at Hidden Lake Academy and Randolph-Macon Academy. The total over multiple years could have exceeded $150,000. Thomas reported none of it. He had previously disclosed a similar but much smaller $5,000 tuition gift from a different friend. (ProPublica)
The other billionaires. ProPublica eventually identified at least three additional billionaires — H. Wayne Huizenga (founder of Blockbuster and Waste Management), Tony Novelly, and former Berkshire Hathaway executive David Sokol — who had also provided Thomas with undisclosed luxury vacations through the Horatio Alger Association. The total: at least 38 destination vacations and 26 private jet flights from multiple billionaires, the vast majority undisclosed. (ProPublica, August 2023)
Samuel Alito — Paul Singer. In 2008, Justice Alito flew to a remote Alaska luxury fishing lodge on a private jet owned by hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer. Had Alito chartered the jet himself, the one-way flight could have cost more than $100,000. The lodge charged over $1,000 per day. Alito disclosed none of it. (ProPublica, June 2023)
The cases that followed. In the years after that fishing trip, Singer's hedge fund came before the Supreme Court at least 10 times. Alito did not recuse himself once. In one 2014 case, the Court ruled in Singer's favor 7–1 on a key issue in his decade-long battle against the nation of Argentina — with Alito in the majority. (ProPublica)
The fixer. Both the Crow-Thomas relationship and the Singer-Alito Alaska trip share a single organizing figure: Leonard Leo — longtime co-chair of the Federalist Society, who personally helped engineer the confirmations of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Leo helped organize the 2008 Alaska trip, asked Singer to provide the jet, and joined Thomas on at least one trip with Crow. Both Crow and Singer were major donors to Leo's political groups. (ProPublica / Common Dreams)
The Senate's response. The Senate Judiciary Committee authorized subpoenas for Crow and Leo. Leo refused to comply. Crow eventually turned over partial records. That partial production alone revealed at least three additional undisclosed private jet trips Thomas had taken on Crow's plane in recent years. (ProPublica, June 2024)
The toothless “code of conduct.” Under public pressure, the Court adopted its first-ever ethics code in late 2023. It contains no enforcement mechanism whatsoever. The justices police themselves. (ProPublica)

Sources: ProPublica — Thomas/Crow Travel • ProPublica — Tuition Payments • ProPublica — 38 Vacations • ProPublica — Alito/Singer Alaska • ProPublica — Senate Investigation

🔐 The Pattern: An Agenda, Not Jurisprudence

Defenders of the Court will say none of this is connected. That Thomas's votes on race are a sincere “originalist” conviction. That Alito's Alaska flight from Singer was simply a free seat on a private jet that would have flown empty. That the timing of Crow's gifts and Thomas's votes is coincidence. The pattern says otherwise.

The donors are not random. Harlan Crow sits on the boards of conservative think tanks that file briefs at the Supreme Court. Paul Singer's Manhattan Institute filed a brief in the Biden student-loan case Alito heard. Robin Arkley II, who provided Alito's lodge stay, was a major donor to the conservative legal movement that argued the cases. (ProPublica / Common Dreams)
The architect is not random either. Leonard Leo — the same man who organized the Alito trip and traveled with Thomas on Crow's plane — personally shepherded the confirmations of every conservative justice on the current Court. The conservative legal movement, the gift-givers, and the justices are not separate worlds. They are one network. (ProPublica)
The rulings track the donor priorities. Citizens United (2010) unleashed unlimited corporate political spending. Shelby County (2013) made it easier for Republican-controlled states to suppress non-white votes. Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) declared partisan gerrymandering beyond federal court review. Brnovich (2021) made Section 2 vote-suppression challenges harder to win. Students for Fair Admissions (2023) ended affirmative action. Callais (2026) gutted what remained of Section 2. Every one of these decisions made it harder for non-white Americans — and easier for the Republican Party that the donors fund — to win elections.
The dissenters have not been quiet. Justice Sotomayor's 2023 affirmative-action dissent: the majority is rolling back “decades of precedent and momentous progress.” Justice Kagan's Callais dissent: Section 2 is “all but a dead letter.” Justice Jackson on the “colorblind” doctrine: “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness.” (NBC News / EJI)
Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, on Alito's defense of his Alaska trip: “It is absolutely impossible that anyone could reasonably interpret that exception to apply to private jet flights.” Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, on Thomas: “This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I've seen… This amount of undisclosed gifts? An official who'd taken what Thomas had would have been fired.” (ProPublica)
This is not a Court interpreting law. This is a Court executing an agenda — an agenda authored by the people paying for its justices' lifestyles. The doctrine of the “colorblind Constitution” isn't a sincere reading of the 14th Amendment by neutral jurists. It is the legal cover that allows that agenda to be enforced.

Sources: ProPublica — Ethics Experts • ProPublica — Investigation Calls • Brennan Center

The Voting Rights Act is dead. Not because it failed — it succeeded beyond the most optimistic dreams of the Selma marchers. Not because Congress repealed it — the last reauthorization passed the Senate 98–0. It is dead because five justices in 2013, and six in 2026, decided that the law Congress passed and four Republican Presidents signed could not survive their personal philosophy of a “colorblind Constitution” — a philosophy that conveniently aligns with the political interests of the party whose donors have been bankrolling those same justices' luxury vacations for decades. The “colorblind” doctrine is not blindness. It is denial — a refusal to see racism in order to preserve it. And the spectacle of the only Black justice on the bench writing the most strident opinions declaring that racial protections in voting and education are unnecessary — while simultaneously accepting millions in undisclosed gifts from white conservative billionaires whose political project depends on those protections being destroyed — is not jurisprudence. It is the most expensive political endorsement in American history. The Founders gave Congress the power to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments precisely so that a captured Court could not undo them. The Court has done it anyway. Whether this republic chooses to undo what it has done is now a question for the rest of us.