Is Trump Rigging 2026 With SCOTUS Help? Two Signs Indicate Just That

Stop there in your tracks. If the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted — and we’re talking about the same court that was never going to touch Roe v. Wade — that would be a monumental decision.

The case took a long and winding road to the Supreme Court, but it has major stakes for democracy. At the center is a legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional maps, which were redrawn by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature after the 2020 census. Louisiana’s population is one-third Black, but lawmakers drew the new map to include only one majority-Black congressional district out of six total.

So, in 2022, a coalition of civil rights groups and Black voters filed a federal lawsuit against Louisiana, arguing that the congressional redistricting had diluted the power of Black voters. In that case, Robinson v. Landry, a federal judge for the Middle District of Louisiana agreed that the state had packed Black voters into a single district, likely violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. The finding was upheld on appeal by a bipartisan panel of Fifth Circuit judges.

Louisiana lawmakers then had a choice: Draw a new map with two majority-Black districts, or accept congressional lines imposed by the Middle District judge. They chose the former, crafting a new map that both met the state’s Voting Rights Act obligations and protected the seats of two Republican incumbents.

This should’ve ended the dispute. Instead, a group of self-described “non-African American voters” sued the state, claiming that the lawmakers’ consideration of race when drawing the new district lines now violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. A different district court, the Western District of Louisiana, sided with the plaintiffs and struck down the remedial map in 2024. This is the case, Louisiana v. Callais, that currently lies before the Supreme Court.

If it all seems convoluted, it actually gets worse. In 2023, the Supreme Court decided a near-identical redistricting case, Allen v. Milligan, ruling that Alabama had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when drawing its congressional districts. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the liberal judges to issue a 5-4 opinion, ordering Alabama to add a second majority-Black district. You’d think that the justices could copy-and-paste their prior decision — or that the Western District would have abided by the Allen v. Milligan ruling. Instead, the justices seem to be seriously considering a change of course.

So let’s break this down. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bans laws or practices that hinder someone’s right to vote on account of their race. Crucially, it’s a statute that considers impact, not intent. In other words, if lawmakers draw congressional maps in ways that preclude certain racial groups from electing representatives of their choice, it could amount to discrimination, regardless of whether that was the goal. This is what two federal courts found had happened when civil rights groups sued Louisiana in Robinson v. Landry, and why the Fifth Circuit ordered Louisiana to come up with new maps.

The 14th Amendment, meanwhile, enshrines equal protection under the law as a constitutional right. It prohibits racial gerrymandering if race is the predominant factor, outweighing every other consideration in map drawing. As a racial equity legal guide from the University of California-Berkeley explains, state legislatures are “permitted to consider racial demographics in drawing political district boundaries,” and “may even be required to do so in order to protect certain voting rights (such as avoiding vote dilution).”

“Although such activities are clearly ‘race-conscious,’ they are not ‘race-based,’” the guide explains.

This tension is at the core of Louisiana v. Callais, but courts have long held that states have a certain amount of “breathing room” for considering race when drawing maps in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Again, the Supreme Court itself upheld this precedent just two years ago. Appellees in Louisiana v. Callais, however, have alleged that the new maps amount to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

During oral arguments in March, the conservative justices seemed concerningly ready to backtrack on their own ruling in Allen v. Milligan in Alabama — if not outright hostile to the Voting Rights Act’s core tenets.

Now connect these dots and then consider that 2026 is a crucial election. With the passage of the despised Big Beautiful Bill, it’s been predicted that a lot of Republican House seats will be lost and that the Senate has now moved into play. That being the case, the surefire way to hang onto power would be to muck with the election gears. How better to do it than by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and the DOJ going after election workers?

You have to admit, Trump talks nonstop about stolen elections. He would not do that if the matter wasn’t constantly on his mind.

And the truth of the matter is that maybe 2024 was messed with in a fashion that we don’t know about. I don’t want to go there because I don’t want to participate in conspiracy theory. But Trump did say many times during the election, “We have all the votes we need,” and why did he feel comfortable saying that? Why did Ann Selzer call the shot wrong in Iowa, after a sterling career of being the gold standard of pollsters? Why did the Oracle of Nevada, Jon Ralston, call the shot wrong?

It’s not a path I want to go down, but we’re being dragged into it, basically, by the actions of the Department of Justice and by the behavior of the Supreme Court. And again I remind you of David Frum’s now famous comment from 2018: “When conservatives realize they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservativism. They will reject democracy.” We may be seeing the transition of America from a democracy to a fascist state take place before our very eyes.