Daily, as we watch our nation’s democratic institutions face growing strain and the Supreme Court regularly limits or reverses rights citizens have long fought to protect, a seven-decade effort by the conservative legal movement to restrict voting rights for people of color appears to be bearing fruit. Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, that effort has reached a crescendo.
Roberts, then a 25-year-old Harvard Law graduate, clerked for Justice William Rehnquist in 1980-1981. Rehnquist, an old-school states’ rights advocate, was well known for his far-right views. While Rehnquist was clerking for Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, he wrote a memo regarding the arguments in Brown v. Board of Education saying the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 – separate but equal – was right and should be reaffirmed.
Rehnquist carried that philosophy with him to Arizona in 1953 to practice law, eventually joining the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964 and urging the then-senator to oppose the Voting Rights Act. From 1960 to 1964, Rehnquist oversaw the Arizona Republican Party’s “Operation Eagle Eye,” designed to challenge the eligibility of Democratic voters at the polls.
Under Rehnquist’s tutelage, according to fellow Supreme Court clerk Paul Smith, “Rehnquist reinforced John’s preexisting philosophies. John was not a believer in the courts giving rights to minorities and the downtrodden. That was the basic Rehnquist philosophy.”
Clerking for Rehnquist gave Roberts a path into the Reagan administration, where he joined the Department of Justice in 1981, focusing on civil rights. Reagan’s DOJ had already begun dismantling significant provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 2005, Rehnquist, then chief justice, died, and George W. Bush nominated Roberts to replace his former mentor. During his confirmation hearings, when asked about the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, Roberts said he had no issue with it and that its constitutionality had been upheld. By 2013, the Shelby County v. Holder decision had eliminated Section 5 of the VRA, which had required federal approval of state changes to election law. As Roberts wrote then – in an assessment noted even by the conservative American Enterprise Institute – “Things have changed dramatically” since 1965.
While Roberts positioned himself as neutral on minority voting rights during his confirmation, his record on the court tells a different story. The court under his leadership has upheld restrictive voter ID laws, allowed mass voter purges, and declined to act on extreme partisan gerrymandering. The culmination is the Louisiana v. Callais decision of April 29, 2026, which ruled Louisiana’s congressional map unconstitutional as racial gerrymandering. Taken together with Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), which held that extreme partisan gerrymandering is a political question beyond the reach of federal courts, the pattern suggests a double standard: gerrymandering is impermissible when it benefits minority voters, but untouchable when it benefits a political party.
The most consequential aspect of Callais may be its gutting of Section 2 of the VRA, dramatically raising the bar for proving racial discrimination in redistricting. Under the new standard, plaintiffs must now demonstrate racist motivation – not merely discriminatory results. That is a formidable burden. Racist intent can be inferred from actions, but proving what is in someone’s mind, against craftily worded legislation and carefully constructed legal defenses, is another matter entirely.
The result is that we have reentered an era that echoes the voter suppression of the Jim Crow years – and the fulfillment of a conservative legal project that has been decades in the making.
Gene Orr, M.Ed., is a retired educator with 43 years of experience teaching social studies and history in middle school, high school and college in Durango. He lives in Kline.