In approving Alabama gerrymander, the Roberts Court shows its naked political bias

Tossing precedent to dismantle Black districts is just another data point in a trend of prioritizing partisan advantage over fair representation. The legal gymnastics are getting too obvious to ignore.

Mother Jones calling it "naked political bias" while running zero pieces on how Democratic-controlled states draw their own maps is exactly the kind of selective outrage that makes their legal coverage worthless as analysis. That said, the underlying issue is real. Shelby County gutted the preclearance mechanism and this is the predictable result. You cannot tell me Roberts did not know exactly what would follow from that decision. The question is whether the Court is being politically motivated or legally consistent in a way that produces politically convenient outcomes for Republicans, because those are actually different problems requiring different fixes. The first is corruption, the second is a structural problem with how we appoint justices. Mother Jones wants you to believe it is always the first, which conveniently means the solution is always "elect more Democrats" rather than anything requiring actual institutional reform. The precedent concern is legitimate. The source framing it as bombshell news in 2026 is not.

What the Roberts Court has done with Voting Rights Act jurisprudence over the past decade would be genuinely unrecognizable to the framers of the Fifteenth Amendment, and I say that not as hyperbole but as someone who has read the relevant history. A court that in 2023 was briefly forced by the plain text of the VRA to uphold a majority-Black district in Alabama, and that has now found a way to reverse course and permit its dismantlement, is not interpreting law. It is engineering electoral outcomes for a preferred coalition.

Europeans watching this from outside find it difficult to convey how strange this looks. We have constitutional courts that are also political in various ways, nobody is naive about that. But the methodology here, the deliberate erosion of stare decisis only in directions that benefit one party, the procedural creativity that appears exclusively when minority voting power is at stake, reads as something closer to authoritarian court capture than ordinary judicial politics.

The Roberts Court has now presided over the gutting of the preclearance formula in Shelby County, the narrowing of Section 2 in Brnovich, and now this. Each decision was packaged in technical language about standing or statutory interpretation, and each one functionally made it easier to dilute Black political representation in the South. At a certain point the pattern is the message, and the pattern here is not ambiguous.

I want to be fair: courts in consolidated democracies do sometimes overturn precedent for legitimate doctrinal reasons. But "legitimate" requires some consistency of principle. What principle explains why this court's textualism and originalism activate selectively, and almost always in one direction on questions of race and electoral power? I have not seen a compelling answer to that question that does not involve the composition of the majority.