VAAC’s Director of Campaigns and Strategic Partnerships, Christopher Ford, has a new op-ed published in the Democracy Docket examining the broader impact of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais and what it means for voting rights, representation, and democracy moving forward.

In the piece, Ford argues that attacks on voting rights are not isolated legal or political disputes, but part of a broader effort to weaken the political power of communities that have historically fought to be heard and represented.

The op-ed connects the Court’s ruling to ongoing efforts to limit access to voting, weaken protections under the Voting Rights Act, and reshape who has influence within American democracy.

Read the full piece below.

Destroying the Voting Rights Act wasn’t just a legal ruling. It was a moral statement

By Christopher Ford

May 12, 2026

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was once described as the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement. But it was not ornamental. It was functional. It was the answer to blood in the streets, to bodies on bridges, to names etched into memory because the nation refused to allow them to do the most basic of our civic duties, voting. 

On April 29, the Supreme Court did not simply reinterpret that jewel. It desecrated it. And in doing so, it handed something far more dangerous to state legislatures across this country: permission. Permission to redraw lines with surgical precision. Permission to dilute voices without saying so aloud. Permission to cloak racial disenfranchisement in the language of procedure. This is how erosion happens in America. Not always with a bang, but with a ruling from six unelected judges and a shrug. 

We have seen this before. We are told that this is progress. That the country has moved beyond its past, that we now live in a “colorblind” society. But if that were true, there would be no need to dismantle the protections that guard against it. Laws do not get stripped away in a vacuum. They are removed because they are in the way of something. 

And what they are is in the way of those who are in power and wish to wield it indiscriminately. 

The story of civil rights in this country is not abstract; it’s living and breathing. It is written in the lives of people who paid for the right to vote with their bodies. Activists beaten in Selma on Bloody Sunday. Freedom Summer volunteers murdered in Mississippi while registering people to vote. People who never saw the fruits of the freedoms they demanded. And the people today still living with the physical and mental scars earned fighting for freedom. 

To weaken the Voting Rights Act is not just a legal act. It is a moral statement. It suggests that the sacrifices made were excessive. That the protections earned are now inconvenient. That the bloodshed can be discounted because it belongs to another era. But the past is not the past. It’s the present.

Issues that were thought to be fully settled are now erased. You see it in the steady dismantling of women’s rights. You see it in the coordinated attacks on diversity and inclusion efforts, where attempts to correct a historic imbalance are recast as threats. You see it in the growing hostility toward immigrants. Rights that once felt stable now feel conditional. 

There is a pattern here. The Court’s action to dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, wasn’t in isolation. It is part of a broader recalibration of rights in this country, one that places more discretion in the hands of those already in power and less protection in the hands of those who have historically been denied it. 

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is not just the policy shifts, but the posture behind them. The casualness with which they are carried out. The sense that history can be brushed aside, that the struggles of prior generations are relics rather than warnings. The distance between then and now is not as wide as we pretend. 

The images may look different. The language may be more polished. But the underlying questions remain the same: Who gets power? Who gets heard? Who gets to shape the future of this country? 

Opponents of the VRA will say that our country is different and that we’ve moved past the need for it, but snuffing out Black representation where the majority of Black Americans live isn’t progress. It’s regression with better branding. The question now is not whether this moment matters. It does. The question is whether we will recognize it clearly enough to respond with the same conviction as those who came before us. They understood something that we are in danger of forgetting. 

While last week’s decision was a blow to fighters for a more just nation, the moral arc of the universe still bends towards justice. Our battle for a nation that represents “we the people” in its truest sense is not closed and will never be closed. Which is why the hollowing out of Section 2 is not an endpoint but a rally cry to continue the work of our forefathers who strove to create an America where all people reach the mountaintop.

Christopher Ford is a political strategist, community organizer, and systems-level advocate based in Metro Detroit, with experience spanning government, party leadership, and grassroots movements.