Kagan, Schumer, Obama, Others Accuse Conservative Justices of Gutting Voting Rights Act

‘I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,’ Justice Elena Kagan said.

The Supreme Court in Washington on April 22, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan filed a scathing dissent to the court’s landmark ruling on Wednesday that deemed race-based redistricting unconstitutional.

In the 6–3 decision, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Kagan’s dissent, and top Democrat leadership have agreed, calling the conservative justices’ ruling an end to the Voting Rights Act that will erode years of progress on racial discrimination in the United States.

“Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot,” Kagan wrote in her 48-page dissent. “But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests.”

The justices’ ruling reinterpreted a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while striking down a majority-black congressional district in Louisiana held by Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.). Louisiana’s congressional map had added a second majority-black district and the high court found that it constituted a racial gerrymander.

This ruling opens the door for more redistricting across the United States, as in Florida, where the state Legislature passed during a special session on Wednesday a new map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In Kagan’s dissent, she wrote that the majority justices’ views “eviscerate” the Voting Rights Act and allow states to systematically dilute minority individuals’ voting power.

“I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act,” Kagan said.

Justice Samuel Alito authored the ruling and was joined by Chief Justices John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas wrote his own concurring opinion.

Alito wrote that “allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.”

Top Democratic leaders also weighed in on the ruling.

Former President Barack Obama wrote in a post on X that the decision “guts” the Voting Rights Act.

“It serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach,” Obama said.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) pledged that he and his colleagues would work to overturn the ruling.

“The Supreme Court turned its back on one of the most sacred promises in American democracy—the promise that every voice counts,” Schumer said in a statement. “The consequence is as clear as it is dangerous: fewer protections for voters, more power for politicians to draw maps that silence them, particularly voters historically disenfranchised.”