In Callais, SCOTUS tossed good decision-making for political goals | In Focus
Published 2:30 pm Monday, June 15, 2026
How do you make decisions? Do you listen to your gut? Do you thoroughly research the background? Do you consider who will be affected? Do you think about worst case scenarios?
These questions immediately came to mind with the two recent major SCOTUS landmark decisions in regard to voting districts in the November midterms: Louisiana vs. Callais in May, gutting the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, and the unsigned shadow docket decision on June 3 regarding Alabama using an older map that wipes out a Black voting district.
A lower court decision declared that that map in Alabama was racist and discriminated against Black voters. The six SCOTUS conservatives ignored the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and ruled in favor of Republicans. This decision strips a Black voting district for the U.S. House and may affect the midterms.
Let’s look at the goals of the six conservatives who made these decisions.
First, these justices knew the history of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the context of the VRA. Their goal clearly is to help President Trump and the Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives. They desire to return to a time when whites were dominant and minorities, especially Blacks, had no political power in the nation. In other words, the justices want to return to Jim Crow 2.0 and they don’t care. SCOTUS listened to their racist gut. They knew full well who would be affected, and they knew the worst-case scenarios but didn’t care.
Maintaining white dominance is the goal of SCOTUS, even if minority voting rights are lost. It’s clear that the SCOTUS majority is not only making racist decisions, they are actually acting in collusion along with the President and Congress to turn this nation into a white-ruled dictatorship.
SCOTUS conservatives violated their own Purcell Principle of not making decisions that were too close to elections. Previously, when Black voting rights were in question, SCOTUS stated they couldn’t rule because it was too close to the election. In these recent cases, both decisions were made when primary voting had already occurred. In Louisiana 40,000 votes were negated as a result of Callais.
Minority justice Sonja Sotomayor gave this dissenting opinion:
“The Court’s decision will cause havoc,” Sotomayor wrote. She added that county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across Alabama to new congressional districts, a process the state previously said “would take months.”
“Down the second path was a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians,” she said.
“It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians,” she wrote. “It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”
These decisions by SCOTUS were not made using careful research, relying on precedent, or even using the conservative doctrine of originalism and textualism where the intent of the framers and its exact wording (textualism) of the Constitution and the 14th and 15th Amendment writers were examined or even considered.
Their decisions are outright racism and are clearly unconstitutional.
So, what can be done about these miscarriages of justice? There is only one answer: We the People must decide to rid the nation of elected Republicans in the midterms. That solution has been made more difficult not only by mid-decade redistricting, which is unconstitutional, but also by President Trump attempting to take the control of voting from the states and centralize voting in the federal government which is also clearly unconstitutional.
That was never the intent of the framers of the Constitution. The authors of the Declaration of Independence penned their proclamation 250 years ago. They were rebelling against a corrupt king and British Parliament. They fought a bloody eight-year war to gain our independence.
Good decision-making means using all the techniques noted at the beginning of this column: Listening to our gut, doing research, considering who will be affected, and thinking about worst case outcomes.
We the People must decide: “We stand at a crossroad; either America will have a multiracial democracy, or it will not be a democracy at all” (The Tyranny of the Minority).
