1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais has finished off what remained of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and Congress needs to act to restore it. This ruling follows a decade of deliberate dismantling — from Shelby County in 2013 to Brnovich in 2021 — and the damage is measurable and real. Justice Alito's majority opinion rests on a foundation of cherry-picked data. He pointed to 2008 and 2012 as proof that racial disparities in voting no longer exist. Those were the only two presidential elections in which Black and white voter turnout reached parity — and they were the years Barack Obama was on the ballot. In the three most recent presidential elections, the racial turnout gap has been widening. Peer-reviewed research shows that Shelby County alone caused hundreds of thousands of minority ballots to go uncast by the 2022 midterms. Alito himself wrote in Callais that "far more germane are current data and current political conditions" — then ignored exactly that standard when it mattered. Congress has the authority to rebuild the VRA's preclearance protections and strengthen Section 2. The court has made clear it won't protect minority voters, so the legislature must. I want to know where you stand on restoring these protections and what you are doing to make that happen.