Yesterday, the US Supreme Court—an institution under a cloud of corruption, in which multiple justices are loyal to the interests of their monied patrons, at the expense of the rule of law—gutted what little remains of the Voting Rights Act. The majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais is not surprising. Not because it is just or defensible—it is neither—but because the writing has been on the wall for years. The Supreme Court has, over the course of several terms, chipped away at the laws and constitutional provisions that best enforce and protect equality of the vote in a country that has long been plagued by profound inequality. It has done so in order to ensure that equality cannot take root, cannot flourish, cannot be defended by state governments that wish to defend it, nor secured by the people in states that would destroy it.

Can a democracy function without equality? It cannot. Can democracy in a multiracial, multicultural country with an incalculably racist and violent past, truly flourish without governments, courts, and laws capable and willing to protect voters of color, and defend their rights to be heard? It cannot. The Supreme Court is aware of this. Congress is aware of this. But still the Supreme Court’s majority continues to entrench the powerful at the expense of democratic principles, of constitutional adherence, of judicial legitimacy. This decision is unmoored from principles of law—as all the Court’s flagrantly anti-democratic decisions have been.

In Callais, the Supreme Court struck down a congressional map that provided Louisiana with two (of six) majority-Black congressional districts. This map was drawn only after protracted Voting Rights Act litigation over Louisiana’s previous map, which provided Black voters with only one majority-Black district and diluted the political power of Black voters. The new map immediately came under attack by a group of non-Black voters, who claimed that it was the racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court has now agreed in a decision that eviscerates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the process. As Justice Elena Kagan eloquently expressed in her dissent, “[t]he consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. [The] decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

The majority’s decision in Callais is, first and foremost, an assault on a plain reading of the Voting Rights Act and our Constitution. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act rejects a standard that would protect facially race-neutral election procedures from challenge unless the plaintiff can prove discriminatory intent; we know this because the Supreme Court already attempted to read a discriminatory-intent requirement into the law, and Congress amended the Voting Rights Act expressly to reject this baseless interpretation. The Supreme Court in Callais claims it is not re-enforcing a discriminatory-intent requirement—but it is clear that, in practice, this is precisely the burden of proof that plaintiffs must now satisfy. Furthermore, the Court has turned the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments on their heads. These powerful, Reconstruction-Era constitutional amendments were intended to protect Black voters from governments that would oppress them. It has become, in the hands of this Supreme Court, a tool to enable vote dilution and deny representation to voters of color.

The Supreme Court accomplished this breathtaking flipping of statutory and constitutional protections by (1) discounting the relevance of historic and contemporary incidents of race- and ethnicity-based voter suppression; and (2) conflating racism and partisanship so that the former becomes legal by calling it the latter.

The Court dismissively claims that great strides have been made in the pursuit of equality, such that the very protections that have enabled this progress are no longer needed. It is not the first time the Supreme Court has done this. When the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance protections of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned, in her dissent, that it was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Shelby County, 570 U.S. at 50 (Ginsberg, J., dissenting). She was right: a torrential downpour followed the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Section 5 umbrella in the form of dozens of voter suppression laws, passed in states that purportedly had no need of provisions to protect their minority voters. Of course, the Court makes no mention of this—after all, if the Court proclaims that racism is behind us, then these suppression laws, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can’t be proof that racism exists.

Just as dangerously, the ruling conflates racial gerrymandering with partisan gerrymandering. It is true that there is evidence that voters of color favor one party over another. What this should indicate to the courts is that purportedly partisan gerrymandering is merely pretext for what is, at heart, an effort to dilute the strength of minority votes. Instead, the Supreme Court seizes on this fact to excuse racial gerrymandering. Having washed its hands of oversight of partisan gerrymandering—in a 2019 ruling, the Supreme Court decided that partisan gerrymandering, though regrettable, was not justiciable—the Court in Callais announces that no plaintiff can successfully assert a claim of racial gerrymandering unless they can disentangle the map from partisan gerrymandering. Under this logic, victims of racist gerrymandering, to prove their case, would have to start voting as a bloc for the party that is diluting their vote before a court is allowed to concern itself with that vote dilution—again, despite the fact that such vote dilution is plainly unlawful under the Voting Rights Act.

The result of these rulings? Gerrymandered maps that amplify white voices are essentially untouchable, presumed to be lawful unless plaintiffs can provide proof that the mapmaking legislature intentionally diluted minority votes and can disentangle the map from partisan concerns. But maps drawn to ensure that voters of color have opportunities to elect their preferred candidates and to correct vote dilution? These maps are, to this Court, unconstitutional. This opinion suggests that anything that entrenches existing inequitable structures is American; anything that moves the needle toward equality should be struck down. It is a breathtaking contortion of the Voting Rights Act and the Reconstruction amendments.

And we all saw it coming. This Court’s majority has long put its own interests and those of their allies ahead of the law. Three members of the Court—all of whom voted with the majority in Callais—have committed impeachable offenses. Another holds his seat only because of congressional abuses of power. This is a Court beholden to the interests of corporations and billionaires instead of to the Constitution or the American people. And a functioning, multiracial democracy does not serve those interests.

Several years ago, our President and Congress had the opportunity to implement Supreme Court reform—and they failed. As a result, our Court is still corrupt, still willing to contort the Constitution and our laws beyond their plain reading to serve the anti-democratic preferences of their allies and benefactors. The majority opinion in Callais should incense and frighten us all. It should also remind us that we must seize on every opportunity to protect our democracy and the rights of our fellow voters. This includes demanding proportional representation. And it includes demanding that our elected officials be willing to wrest democracy back from the powerful, to hold the corrupt accountable, and to stand for the multiracial and equitable democracy that our Constitution demands and our country needs.