Before we get into what this Supreme Court is doing now, it is worth remembering what it has always been capable of. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It took Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to begin correcting the most catastrophic of those failures — and even then, states had to be dragged toward compliance like toddlers toward a bath. The Court has always had the capacity for moral failure at scale. What is different now is the combination of ambition and costume.
Ever since the conservative supermajority took over, people would ask me how often I thought the Supreme Court was making sound decisions. My answer was 65% of the time. People would hear that and say “well, that’s not too bad” and I would have to explain to them slowly — the way you explain things to someone who just failed a test and somehow thought the curve would save them — that 65% is an F. It has always been an F. The letter F did not recently renegotiate its meaning to accommodate six people in Halloween costumes pretending to interpret law.
That was before Louisiana v. Callais. I can’t give them the 65 anymore. And I say that as someone who watched this chainsaw scene coming from three highway exits back.
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I was not one of those hip-hop heads who grew up worshipping Scarface. I thought the 1983 Brian De Palma film was fine — Al Pacino is genuinely electric in it — but I always felt like the die-hard fans learned the wrong lessons. They saw Tony Montana as aspirational. A blueprint. They missed that he was a cautionary tale with a great wardrobe and a catastrophic ending.
It wasn’t until I got deeper into my political science studies that I went back and watched Scarface again and realized I had completely undersold it. What I once thought was just an okay movie — entertaining, loud, a little excessive — started to reveal layers I hadn’t fully appreciated the first time around. The characters hit differently. Tony Montana wasn’t just a chaotic drug kingpin anymore; he was a case study in unchecked ambition, identity construction, and the psychological need to consume power rather than manage it. Frank Lopez, on the other hand, wasn’t just a secondary character in Tony’s story. He was the stabilizing force — a man who understood the limits of power, even if he operated outside the law.
That’s when it clicked for me. This is not a movie about the Miami cocaine trade. This is a movie about Washington, D.C. I don’t think Brian De Palma or Oliver Stone set out to make a film about American political power. But that is exactly what they made.
The character who actually understood power was Frank Lopez. Frank was not a good man. Let’s not romanticize this — he was running a criminal empire, not a nonprofit. But within that world, Frank had discipline. He also, unlike what we’d later learn about Tony, actually took time to enjoy what he built. The nice suits, the quiet dinners, the ability to exist without constantly looking over his shoulder — Frank understood that power is supposed to fund a life, not replace it.
He knew the first rule of sustainable power: don’t get high on your own supply. Don’t show your hand. Don’t reach for more than you can realistically hold without the whole thing collapsing on top of you. Frank liked money. He liked control. He liked not being dead. And it turns out those three preferences tend to reinforce each other when you’re thinking clearly.
His one fatal mistake — the mistake that cost him everything — was misreading Tony Montana. Frank assumed Tony was playing the same game: accumulate, consolidate, maintain. Build something you can keep. What he failed to grasp was that Tony wasn’t trying to win the game. Tony was trying to eat the board. There was no end state for him, no point where he said “this is enough.” ▶More wasn’t a goal, it was a reflex.
Frank didn’t lose because Tony was smarter or even more capable. He lost because he underestimated the length and depth of Tony’s ambition — how far he was willing to go, how fast he was willing to burn everything down, including himself, to get there. Frank was managing power. Tony was addicted to it. And that is a mismatch you only get wrong once.
The Roberts Court played Frank Lopez for about a decade. Even as it moved right — chipping away at voting rights in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, weakening Section 2 further in Brnovich v. DNC in 2021 — it maintained just enough restraint to preserve the illusion of a functioning institution. John Roberts understood, at least strategically, that the robe only works if people believe in it.
Then Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg eight days before a presidential election — a seat that Mitch McConnell had refused to fill four years earlier because, he claimed with a straight face that deserves its own place in the Smithsonian, it was an election year. McConnell treated the Constitution less like a governing document and more like a takeout menu — binding when it suited him, optional when it didn’t. The man didn’t just move the goalposts. He picked them up, drove them across state lines, and then blamed everyone else for not knowing where the game was being played.
Now, to be fair — and I don’t do this lightly — Ruth Bader Ginsburg probably should have stepped down when her health first started declining during Obama’s presidency. That’s not disrespect, that’s structural reality. The stakes were too high, and the Court is too important to treat timing like a personal preference. History is not kind to missed windows, especially when the other side is operating like it’s playing speed chess with a loaded board.
Once that seat flipped, the supply started flowing. Dobbs. The immunity ruling. Chevron. And now Louisiana v. Callais — where the Court manufactured a constitutional question that none of the original parties even asked for, gutted the last meaningful provision of the Voting Rights Act, and called it a principled defense of the Constitution. That’s not jurisprudence. That’s a group of people who realized there are no immediate consequences for excess and decided to test just how far that lack of consequences actually goes.
That’s Tony Montana at the height of his delusion. Nose in the pile. Running out of people to betray. Convinced that more is always the answer.
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Let me tell you what actually happened in this case, because the legal theater is designed to make your eyes glaze over and that is entirely intentional.
Louisiana is approximately 33% Black. For decades, the state had exactly one majority-Black congressional district. After the 2020 census, civil rights organizations sued, arguing that a state one-third Black deserved two majority-Black districts so that Black voters might have a meaningful shot at electing someone who actually represents them. Novel concept. Lower courts agreed. Louisiana drew the second district. Then a group of voters who described themselves in court documents as “non-African American” — which is doing a lot of work as a legal classification — sued, claiming the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the six-justice majority, agreed with them. His central argument was that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race” and that the question before the Court was whether “compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”
Now, if you’re wondering whether that framing sounds like it was assembled out of spare parts and legal jargon found in a clearance bin, that’s because it was. And let’s not pretend this is confusion. Alito knows exactly what the fuck he is doing here. This isn’t a man lost in the weeds of constitutional interpretation. This is a man carefully arranging words into something that looks like principle from a distance and collapses into nonsense the moment you apply pressure. He took the protection of Black voters’ right to meaningful representation — in a state that is one-third Black — and repackaged it as racial discrimination. Not misinterpreted. Repackaged.
Against whom, exactly? Against the “non-African American” voters — a phrase doing Olympic-level work in those filings — who are apparently being harmed by the existence of a congressional district where Black Louisianans might elect someone who actually represents their interests. That’s the argument. That is what six justices signed their names to. And Alito dressed it up like it was a serious constitutional dilemma instead of what it actually is: a word salad designed to make the dismantling of voting rights sound like the protection of them.
Now here is the part that should make every person with a functioning brain stop and sit with the irony for a moment. These are six people with law degrees from the most prestigious institutions in the country. Harvard. Yale. Notre Dame. Combined they have more legal training than most courtrooms have ever seen assembled in one room. And not one of them — not one — bothered to engage with decades of peer-reviewed scholarship on what race actually is and what racism actually does. Ashley Montagu published Man’s Most Dangerous Myth in 1942. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton defined institutional racism with surgical precision in 1967. Carol Anderson documented the entire historical pattern in exhaustive detail in 2016. These books exist. They are not obscure. They are in libraries. Some of them are on Amazon with two-day shipping.
Six of the most credentialed legal minds in the country looked at a question about race and racism and decided the scholarship simply did not apply to them. That is not judicial independence. That is willful ignorance with a benefits package.
And here is the part that keeps me up at night: if these six legal geniuses had been sitting on the bench in 1954, ▶Brown v. Board of Education would have come out very differently. They would have written forty pages explaining why separate was actually quite equal if you looked at it from the right angle, cited three precedents that technically supported their conclusion, and then scheduled a press conference to accept awards for their commitment to constitutional originalism.
The audacity of Alito’s framing is not accidental. It is the entire con. He didn’t just reach a bad conclusion. He inverted the premise so completely that the remedy became the crime. That is not legal reasoning. That is a magic trick for people who find racism more comfortable when it comes with footnotes.
Justice Elena Kagan was not having it. She read portions of her 48-page dissent aloud from the bench — a move reserved for the Court’s most profound disagreements — and dropped the customary word “respectfully” from her conclusion. She wrote simply: “I dissent.” She called the ruling “the latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act” and said Section 2 is now “all but a dead letter.” She noted that the decision returns Section 2 to what it was before Congress specifically amended it in 1982 to reject the Court’s previous interpretation. In other words, six justices just undid forty years of congressional intent because they felt like it.
Kagan also noted she would be interested to see whether the “great strides” in Black political representation the majority cited would “hold up after the issuance of this opinion.” Her guess, she wrote, was not.
Mine either.
Let us be clear about what Louisiana v. Callais actually is at its foundation. The highest court in the land — the final word on constitutional law in the United States of America, the institution that is supposed to be the last line of defense between the law and the people who want to bend it — made this decision based on hunches and feelings. Not facts. Not data. Not legal precedent that could survive ten minutes of honest scrutiny. Hunches and feelings dressed up in Latin and footnotes. And before anyone says that’s too harsh, I want to remind you that this is not the first time this goddamn garbage conservative majority has operated this way and it will not be the last. These are not close calls being decided by serious people wrestling with difficult questions. These are predetermined conclusions in search of a rationale — and the rationale keeps getting sloppier because nobody with the power to stop them has been willing to do it.
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I need to establish my lane, because it matters to how I analyze this.
I am a political scientist, not a lawyer. I teach American Government, political behavior, political psychology, and voting behavior. When I want to understand the legal architecture of a decision like this, I turn to people whose entire professional life is built around that work — lawyers like Marc Elias of Democracy Docket and Michael Popok, people who treat the Voting Rights Act not as a technicality but as the structural foundation of multiracial democracy.
And I want to say something about lawyers specifically. When Harvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan Jr. — one of the most accomplished criminal defense attorneys in this country, Harvard’s first Black faculty dean, a man who built the conviction review unit at the Brooklyn DA’s office and got more than twenty wrongfully convicted people released — joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal team, students protested until he was pushed out. I hated every second of that. Sullivan’s career was built on the principle that every defendant, no matter how despised, deserves a vigorous defense. That is not a character flaw. That is the Sixth Amendment doing exactly what it was designed to do. The Harvard Black Law Students Association understood this and said so publicly. The administration caved anyway.
The same principle applies to Shawn Chapman Holley, who represented Danny Masterson. I thought Masterson was guilty. I still believe that. It did not matter one bit to whether he deserved a competent defense. The moment we start deciding who deserves sound legal representation, we have broken something that protects everyone — including the people doing the protesting.
A political scientist’s job is different from a lawyer’s. A lawyer asks whether the legal reasoning is sound. I ask a different question: does this decision move the country toward democracy or away from it? Does it expand the circle of political participation or contract it? Does it reflect the actual needs of the society it governs?
By every one of those measures, Louisiana v. Callais is a catastrophic failure. And I am done softening that assessment to make it more comfortable for people who prefer their institutional critiques lukewarm.
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This ruling is racist. And I mean that in the academic sense — not the cable news sense, not the Twitter sense, but the framework that social scientists have used for decades.
Anthropologist Ashley Montagu established in his landmark 1942 work Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race that race, as a biological category, is a fiction. A social construct. A classification system invented to organize power, not genetics. The traits we associate with race do not cluster into clean scientific boxes. They shift with geography, history, and politics. If race were purely biological, it would not require a one-drop rule to maintain. It would not change depending on the decade or the country. It would not need the Supreme Court of the United States to manage it. Race is fake. The consequences of race are brutally real. That distinction is the entire ballgame.
But here is where Stokely Car…
