The GOP Supreme Court That Gave Us Trump Will Now Try to Save His Sorry Ass

When Columbia University’s Elizabeth Saunders watched Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and Pete Hegseth each find their own terrible reason to support the U.S. invasion of Venezuela, she reached for a term from political science: a logroll. “Everybody can find their reason and get on board.”

The same word applies to what is about to happen to the Voting Rights Act, as the Republican majority prepares to finish gutting the law that did more to bring equality to this country than any other — and hand the GOP up to 19 majority-Black districts to redraw for their pleasure. Samuel Alito gets to complete his ideological project.

John Roberts gets to finish what he started as a 26-year-old Reagan DOJ lawyer in 1981. The Republican legal establishment gets its half-century dream of anti-Civil Rights jurisprudence, that is, in practice, an enormous gift to white Republican voters. The Trump regime gets the maps it needs to survive an election it deserves to lose. And all of them, in exchange for getting what they wanted, have been perfectly willing to deliver America the closest thing we’ve had to a king in at least 250 years, which is definitely preferable, for them, to the alternative once guaranteed by the VRA: a multiracial democracy.

That’s the logroll. It isn’t a coincidence that their 50-year policy goals and Trump’s goal of making himself a dictator happen to coincide entirely. It reveals the preference underneath. They would rather have a Republican oligarchy, with Trump sitting on top of it, than a country where they have to win fair elections to hold power.

This fall, we don’t just need to save ourselves from Trump and his corporate sponsors. We need to beat the GOP’s generations-long plot — traceable at least to the Lewis Powell Memo of 1971 — to reverse the gains of minorities and women.

They’re trying to finish it right now, through a case most people have never heard of, with a decision that will rank with Bush v. Gore, Trump’s immunity ruling, and Shelby County v. Holder — the original gutting of the VRA — as one of the worst and most lawless in our history.

What the Court Is About to Do

The case is Louisiana v. Callais. It will go down in infamy, like much of America in 2026.

After the 2020 census, Louisiana drew a congressional map with one majority-Black district out of six — in a state that is one-third Black. A federal court found this violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans maps that dilute Black and Latino voting power, and ordered a second majority-Black district. Louisiana drew it. Then a group of white Louisiana voters sued, arguing that drawing the second district was itself unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court heard the case, couldn’t reach a decision, and scheduled a second round of arguments — this time broadening the question from whether Louisiana’s specific map was valid to whether using race to create majority-minority districts violates the Constitution at all.

Section 2 is what’s left of the VRA. Roberts gutted Sections 4 and 5 in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Alito gutted Section 2 outside redistricting in Brnovich in 2021 — since that ruling, there has not been a single successful Section 2 lawsuit outside of redistricting. Callais is the last bastion of the law that Ronald Reagan, who signed its reauthorization in 1982, even after his own DOJ spent a year trying to kill it, called “the crown jewel of American liberties.” The Republican justices already know where they’re going. The only question is how bad it will be.

And to that, I have but two words: Samuel Alito.

My theory on who’s writing it: SCOTUSblog’s Carolyn Shapiro noted in March 2026 that the October sitting — when Callais was argued — has produced majority opinions from everyone on the court except Alito and one other.

Alito has authored several of the majority opinions in the Court’s campaign against the VRA, including Brnovich. On March 2, he issued a solo concurring opinion in an unrelated case that election law scholar Rick Hasen read as Alito telegraphing the Callais ruling or corralling votes for it. The argument Alito has been building: a map that dilutes Black voting power might only be targeting partisan voting — since Black voters tend to vote Democratic, the way evangelicals vote Republican — and partisan gerrymanders are already legal, thanks to a Roberts Court that issued that ruling by what can only be described as a striking coincidence of benefit to the Republican Party.

Roberts Has Been Trying to Do This Since 1981

John Roberts is 26 years old, fresh off a Rehnquist clerkship, starting as a special assistant to Reagan’s attorney general. His assignment: come up with the arguments against strengthening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and do it without making Reagan look racist. His papers at the National Archives show memos, talking points, draft op-eds, scripted answers for his bosses to deliver in congressional hearings.

The strategy that Ari Berman described a decade ago: claim support for the VRA while rendering it impossible to enforce.

Congress passed the reauthorization anyway, with the effects test Roberts fought to kill. He lost that round. That made it personal.

So he’s been working toward his revenge ever since. In 2013, writing for the majority in Shelby County v. Holder, he gutted Sections 4 and 5 — the preclearance requirement that had blocked discriminatory voting changes before they took effect — while being careful to say the ruling “in no way affects” Section 2. Texas announced a new restrictive voter ID law the same day the opinion dropped. With Section 5 gone, Roberts and the Republican majority have been chipping away at Section 2 ever since.

Two years ago, in Allen v. Milligan, Roberts surprised everyone by joining the liberals in a 5–4 decision upholding Section 2 as applied to Alabama’s nearly identical map.

Then the court took Callais, couldn’t decide it, and broadened the question to the one Roberts and Kavanaugh had just answered. Courts do not broaden questions when they give a shit about the precedent they are about to torch.

What Goes With the VRA

The Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action ran the numbers: gutting Section 2 hands Republicans 19 additional safe House seats across 10 Southern states. Add Trump’s simultaneous push for mid-decade redistricting in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and elsewhere, and the net gain reaches 27. Up to 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus could lose their seats. Eleven percent of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. And 191 Democratic state legislative seats held by Black lawmakers in majority-minority districts across those same states.

Every Black person ever elected to represent Louisiana in Congress, per the ACLU, was elected from a district created to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Senior Trump advisers are already telling donors that Callais is one of the cases they expect to “transform” Republican power to win elections for years. And these kinds of structural abominations are all they’ve got when Trump is doing everything he can to not only destroy his popularity with his dogshit policies, intolerable acts, and judgment but abandon the coalition of voters that — with the MAGA Supreme Court majority’s help — made him president twice.

States have been quietly adjusting their election filing deadlines to create a window to redraw maps before November if the ruling drops in June, as expected. Some Louisiana Republicans have said privately they want maps that elect six white Republicans from all six of the state’s congressional seats.

The Same Court That Made the MAGA Murder Regime Possible

The immunity ruling that handed Trump the presidency came from these same justices. When arguments were heard on April 25, 2024, Alito showed up not as a jurist but as a Truth Social account reposting Trump’s grievances with an emphatic “THIS!!!” Trump’s lawyers argued a president could order the assassination of any American on a hunch. The Republican men on the bench treated this as a serious constitutional question. That ruling is why Trump is president today instead of a defendant.

The logroll spins on both ends. The immunity ruling served Trump. The Callais ruling serves the Republican party’s 50-year project. In exchange, the justices got their appointments, their careers, their legacy opinions. Everybody found their reason. Everybody got on board. No Republican is worried about the consequences of giving a man who refused to leave office last time and is now building a luxury bunker at great speed under the White House more power with even less accountability. Because the other option is unbearable: Republicans actually have to come up with good ideas that appeal to all Americans and win fairly on them.

In this economy?!

The immunity ruling handed Trump an imperial presidency. The Callais ruling hands his party the maps it needs to survive losing an election it deserves to lose. The Republicans who should know better instead know there’s no limit to how far they can go to protect Trump now. And only the people, through extraordinary action on the streets and at the polls, will decide if they get away with it. 

There’s truly only one check left on Trump’s power when our highest court refuses to let reality — the inevitability that they’re provoking Trump to greater and greater tyranny — get in the way of the only thing that matters: Republicans winning.

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