If you’ve sometimes had mixed feelings about Colorado joining Donald Trump’s gerrymander wars, the Supreme Court’s catastrophic ruling on the 1965 Voting Rights Act should clear your mind.
The wars will now only grow more intense, with little chance of ceasefire, since as many as 15 majority-minority districts, all of them Democratic, could possibly be eliminated and carved up to turn them into majority-white Republican districts by 2028.
Not every Republican-held state in the South will go that far, we can hope. But that’s just a hope. What we can expect to see is what some are calling a “bleaching” of our body politic.
Want early access to
Mike’s columns?
Subscribe to get an
exclusive first look at
his columns twice a week.
Since this Congress can be depended on to do nothing to address the court’s ruling, the only recourse is for Democratic states like Colorado to help restore some balance. Coloradans will vote in November allowing for temporary midcycle redistricting, which would go into effect in 2028, changing what is now a 4-4 congressional split to a 7-1 Democratic advantage.
There is no longer any real choice. The fact that congressional gerrymandering is wrong and anti-democratic doesn’t hold up, morally speaking, against the court’s ruling that states can now eliminate majority Black congressional districts — which were drawn to protect the opportunity to elect Black representatives — so long as the states can say they are doing it for partisan reasons.
In other words, Southern states, in which half of American Blacks reside and which are now almost universally Republican, can freely and safely dilute Black residents’ voting power because the Constitution, we’re told, is colorblind.
This concept of colorblindness, celebrated by Donald Trump, is, of course, an actual blind. In Trump’s view, nearly all the discrimination in America is either against white people or Christians, particularly white Christian nationalists. History that says otherwise is to be eliminated in federal museums and national parks and wherever else Trump’s reach extends.
The end of affirmative action is not enough for Trump, so he has to also put an end to DEI programs that promote diversity — in matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
The court’s view on colorblindness, by the way, is entirely unrelated to what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. meant. You could look it up. His “I Have a Dream Speech” was about a yet-unrealized future. The fight for justice for all, which continued for King until the day he was assassinated, is still being fought — however much those who would have opposed King back in the day try to claim (some of) his words as theirs.
Which leads to an obvious question: How can courts tell when states are discriminating against Blacks since they can legally discriminate against a particular political party, even though that can mean much the same thing?
The answer: It can’t.
So here we are. If you have to discriminate against minorities to stay in power, so be it. It’s now officially legal.
As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic of the decision’s effect: “Trying to disenfranchise Black voters isn’t racist; preventing Louisiana from disenfranchising Black voters is racist.”
In making this ruling, the court has, in effect, overturned what is among the most monumental laws ever passed by Congress. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her powerful dissent — which ran longer than Justice Samuel Alito’s 6-3 majority opinion — the ruling “demolishes the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”
Alito made it clear in his decision that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.”
But, as Kagan countered, “The Voting Rights Act is — or, now more accurately, was — one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history. It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed — not the Members of this Court.”
This case got to the Supreme Court because the Louisiana legislature had tried to squeeze two majority-minority districts into one. A court held that doing so violated the Voting Rights Act and was therefore unconstitutional. So the lines were redrawn, in a state that has six districts and whose population is one-third Black. And when the lines were redrawn, then came the appeals to the high court.
For many years, the spirit behind the Voting Rights Act has been a mostly bipartisan affair in American politics. Presidents of both parties have congressional updates on the Voting Rights Act to much fanfare. Congressional votes in favor of reinforcing the Act were usually overwhelming.
But that was then, before the court, over years, held affirmative action to be discriminatory, before Chief Justice John Roberts began what has become a three-pronged attack on the Voting Rights Act, beginning in a 2012 decision that weakened the law and ending with this 2026 decision that basically reversed it.
The Voting Rights Act gave force to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which were passed after the Civil War and largely ignored, especially in the then-Democratic-Party-controlled South. When Lyndon Johnson had the nerve to push for the bill and then sign it, he predicted that the South would be lost by Democrats for a generation.
Well, we’re up to three generations by now, and no one expects that trend to end any time soon, even as Trump has made racism — against “shithole” countries, against pet-eating Somalis, against immigrants who aren’t white South Africans, against Black generals or female generals, and on and on — an apparently acceptable political position. (And while he’s trying to undo the birthright citizenship that was promised in the 14th Amendment.)
Interestingly, Alito presented his opinion as simply tweaking the Voting Rights Act rather than overturning it, that it was more of an update than what is clearly a chaos-inducing earthquake. He didn’t want the decision to be seen as alarmist, I guess, in a time when we truly do have a national emergency.
So much is up for grabs, especially for Democrats, who see that they must take back at least the U.S. House and maybe the Senate, to rein in — at least in part — Trump’s march to authoritarianism.
But to make that work — to allow Democrats to match Republicans in the gerrymander wars — they also must vote in large numbers to take control of state houses and governorships in swing states. We’ve seen the fights play out in Texas and California, Missouri and Virginia.
And now Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry — citing emergency powers, of course — has ordered House primary elections to pause in his state in an effort to get lines redrawn in time for the midterms. Louisiana voters, as you’d expect, are filing lawsuits from Shreveport to New Orleans.
As one voting rights activist told The New Republic, “This is the ‘break glass in case of emergency’ moment for American democracy.”
You may remember Chief Justice Roberts’ words as he was casting aside one of the affirmative action laws: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
As of today in Congress, according to the Pew Research Center, 139 senators and representatives identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American. Two decades ago, the number was 73.
The growth can rightly be attributed, in part, to a growing acceptance of minorities in positions of power. But only in part.
When racial discrimination in voting representation is legal, watch how precipitously those numbers fall. Watch how progression turns into regression.
And watch as an already imperiled American democracy, in its 250th year, takes yet another shot across the bow.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.