When working for the Reagan administration in 1982, a young John Roberts stated, “Voting Rights Act violations should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive involvement by federal courts into state and local procedures.”

After forty years, the court’s conservative majority appears poised to carry out Roberts’ fight against the most significant civil rights law in the nation, seriously undermining it from every point.

The Roberts Court’s 2013 decision that states with a long history of discrimination were exempt from federal approval for changes to their voting rules and electoral boundaries allowed for a new wave of voter suppression initiatives. Eight years later, the court significantly increased the difficulty of overturning statutes that discriminate against minority voters.

The court heard a new challenge to the federal Voting Rights Act from Alabama on Tuesday, which may result in a significant reduction in representation for communities of color. The statute was inspired by civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s.

Despite having a 27 percent Black population, just one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts has a good chance of electing a candidate who is popular among Black voters. During the most recent redistricting process, civil rights groups filed a lawsuit, alleging that the state’s failure to design a second district with a majority of Black residents violated the VRA. Black voters in Alabama have less opportunities than other Alabamians to elect politicians of their choosing to Congress, according to a three-judge panel that included two of Donald Trump’s nominees.

In contrast, the Supreme Court upheld Alabama’s initial redistricting plan for the November elections in a 5-4 shadow docket judgment from last February.

The justices now seem prepared to take the case Merrill v. Mulligan a step further. Partisan gerrymandering was previously upheld by the court, and racial gerrymandering may soon receive the same treatment.

Alabama argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday that using race as a factor in the creation of new districts would be discriminatory in and of itself, violating the Voting Rights Act. If the Court’s conservative majority follows this “race-blind” logic, it would defeat the law’s intended goal of ending decades of discrimination against Black people and other historically marginalized minority groups. It would also impede representation for communities of color as the US moves toward a future in which minorities make up the majority of the population.

Edmund LaCour, the state’s attorney general, was reprimanded by Justice Elena Kagan: “The benchmark you offered has never been accepted by this court.” According to previous Supreme Court precedents, the argument put forth by civil rights organizations was “kind of a slam dunk,” she claimed. In the first week of the court’s oral arguments, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stated that it was deeply ahistorical to read the country’s civil rights statutes and the Constitution without taking race into account. The [14th] amendment’s entire purpose, according to her, “was to secure rights for the freed former slaves.”

Alabama is trying to argue that, by taking race into account, the Voting Rights Act violates the 14th Amendment. Enter Justice Jackson with a little history lesson.https://t.co/6WgPoYmb6H pic.twitter.com/3v0WERTcO5

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) October 4, 2022

Despite describing some of Alabama’s claims as “very far-reaching,” Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s most conservative members, attempted to focus the issue in order to essentially help the state win. Your claim that the VRA “needs the evidence that there can be a legitimately constructed majority-minority district” is, according to Alito, “your least far-reaching argument.” It can’t just be any district with a majority of minorities; it needs to be carefully planned. Furthermore, a district that is fairly structured is one that an objective mapmaker would construct, not just one that is compact.

The aim of Alito and some of the other conservative justices, such as Brett Kavanaugh, appears to be to reshape the VRA in a way that makes it more difficult for minority voters to win racial gerrymandering cases—without making it appear as though they are rewriting the law, according to UCLA law professor Rick Hasen in a tweet.

…what Alito is trying to do is to radically change the test for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a way to help the state win while pretending he's making no such thing.

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 4, 2022

Incidences of the case go well beyond Alabama. The 2021 redistricting cycle would be the first in 50 years without states with a history of discrimination requiring approval from the federal government for their redistricting maps as a result of the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling. With Republican-controlled states either failing to create new majority-minority districts to keep up with demographic changes or even dismantling existing ones, which had long been thought to be prohibited under the VRA, this resulted in a dramatic reversal of past gains for minority voters in states throughout the South. As a result, following the 2022 midterm elections, the number of congressional districts with a majority of Black people might drop from the current 22 to as low as nine.

The Supreme Court stated during its most recent term that decisions on abortion should be made by “the people’s elected representatives” in the states. But the Supreme Court has steadily widened the gap between the people and their elected officials by undermining efforts to make American democracy fairer and more just.