A woman casts her ballot at a polling station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 3, 2024.Kamil KrzaczynskI/AFP/Getty
The Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective laws in prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. One of its key provisions has long allowed states to take race into account when drawing voting maps to ensure that nonwhite voters have electoral power. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowed that provision. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the court’s decision as the “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
Jamelle Bouie, a political columnist for the New York Times, often analyzes today’s political stories through the lens of a historian. He’s written about why the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision to exclude African Americans from becoming citizens still matters today and how the Trump administration’s war on the federal government is similar to the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” campaign. And he’s also examined the conservative movement’s now-successful effort to dismantle the Voting Rights Act.
“The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country,” Bouie says.
On this week’s More To The Story, Bouie and host Al Letson talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is experiencing a constitutional emergency.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2025.
Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
