This Is How the Voting Rights Act Dies — And It Is Happening Right Here in New Orleans

By Jeff Thomas | Black Source Media

Stop thinking about this as a clerk fight.

Forget Calvin Duncan versus Chelsey Richard Napoleon for a minute. Set aside the City Council’s 5-2 vote. Put down the debate about Act 15 and whether it created a new office or just renamed an old one.

All of that matters. We’ve covered all of that. But what happened Wednesday is bigger — and if New Orleans, Louisiana, and this country don’t recognize it for what it is, we may look back on this week as the moment the Voting Rights Act took its last breath.

Now notice who didn’t get a letter: Councilmembers Lesli Harris and Eugene Green. The two who voted no.

Murrill didn’t threaten the people who pushed back on the resolutions. She went after the people who supported them — the officials who stood up for 38,000 voters and said, publicly and on the record, that Black votes should count for something.

That is not legal enforcement. That is a warning shot. And the message inside it is plain: defend Black voting power in Louisiana and we will come for your seat.

First, You Need to Understand What’s Already Gone

To understand why Wednesday changed everything, you have to understand how little of the Voting Rights Act is still standing. We’ve written about this before — about the promise of the VRA and the years of sustained assault against it, and about how modern suppression doesn’t come with slurs — it comes dressed in legal briefs and constitutional arguments. But the timeline bears repeating, because it matters right now.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, it had real teeth. Section 5 required states with a documented history of racial discrimination — most of the Deep South, Louisiana included — to get federal approval before changing anything related to voting. A district line. A polling location. A voter ID requirement. None of it could happen without Washington signing off first. That protection was called preclearance. For nearly fifty years, it was the most powerful legal tool Black Americans had.

Then came Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. The Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula — the mechanism that determined which states needed preclearance — and called it outdated. Without that formula, Section 5 became a dead letter. Within hours of the ruling, Texas, North Carolina, Mississippi, and others started passing the restrictive voting laws that preclearance had been blocking for decades. The floodgates opened the same afternoon.

Section 2 Was Supposed to Be the Backup

After Shelby County, civil rights attorneys pivoted to Section 2. That provision banned any voting practice that resulted in racial discrimination, regardless of intent. It was slower and more expensive than preclearance, but it was something. Attorneys used it to challenge discriminatory maps, purged voter rolls, and voter ID laws across the country.

That didn’t last either. In 2021, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee dramatically narrowed how Section 2 could be applied. Suddenly, proving racial discrimination in voting required clearing much higher bars. Justice Gorsuch went further — writing a concurrence joined by Justice Thomas that practically invited lower courts to strip private parties of the right to bring Section 2 claims at all. The 8th Circuit took that invitation. Private plaintiffs can no longer enforce Section 2 in that circuit. The wall is coming down brick by brick.

And then, just fourteen days ago — April 29, 2026 — the Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais and finished what Brnovich started. This was our case. Louisiana’s case. A 6-3 ruling written by Justice Alito struck down the congressional map giving Black voters two majority-Black districts — the map that simply reflected the fact that Black people make up one-third of this state’s population. The Court called it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

But that headline buried the real damage. Underneath it, the Court rewrote the 40-year framework for proving a Section 2 violation. It added new evidentiary hurdles. Moreover, it let states defend almost any discriminatory map by claiming they were gerrymandering on party lines instead of racial ones — even though in Louisiana and across the South, race and party cannot be untangled. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund called it evisceration of Section 2 “in all but name.” The Campaign Legal Center called it one of the most consequential setbacks for democracy in a generation. Both are right. Callais came out of Louisiana, was decided against Louisiana’s Black voters, and the country barely blinked.

One Leg Left — and Roberts Has Been Gunning for It Since 1982

So here is the tally. Shelby County killed preclearance. Brnovich cracked Section 2. Callais — fourteen days ago, in our own state — finished cracking it. The 8th Circuit is stripping private enforcement. And Section 11(b), the anti-intimidation provision, is the last leg still holding.

None of this is accidental. And none of it happened fast. This is John Roberts’s life’s work — and I mean that literally, not as a rhetorical flourish.

In 1982, Roberts was 27 years old and working at the Reagan Justice Department. His assignment was to develop legal arguments against strengthening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The memos he produced during that period — now sitting in the National Archives — show a young lawyer working methodically and enthusiastically to build the intellectual framework that would limit the VRA’s reach. He wasn’t following reluctant orders. He believed it. He helped construct the argument that racial intent, not racial impact, should be the standard for proving discrimination. That argument has since been used to hollow out every meaningful VRA protection the Court has touched.

After Shelby County, the legal publication Balls and Strikes ran a piece titled simply: “Killing the Voting Rights Act Is John Roberts’s Life’s Work.” After Callais came down two weeks ago, CNN Politics ran: “John Roberts’ Effort to Gut the Voting Rights Act Is Complete.” Forty-four years. From a Reagan-era memo pad to the Chief Justice’s chair. Patient. Deliberate. Always dressed in the language of neutral legal principle. The project is nearly done. Section 11(b) is all that remains standing.

Read What Murrill Did Against That Statute

Section 11(b) doesn’t just protect voters standing in line at a polling place. It protects anyone for “urging or aiding any person to vote or attempt to vote.” That language was written deliberately broad. It covers poll workers, election officials, attorneys who help voters, and advocates. Importantly, it also covers elected officials who stand up in a public meeting and say the votes of their constituents deserve to be honored.

Now apply that to what Murrill did.

The New Orleans City Council voted publicly to defend the outcome of an election in which 38,000 people cast ballots. Five members supported resolutions designed to give those voters a voice. The mayor advocated for the same. The district attorney backed it.

In response, Murrill sent personal letters to each of them saying: retract what you did or lose your seat.

She didn’t file a lawsuit. She didn’t seek a court order. She didn’t ask a judge to weigh in on whether the council acted lawfully. Instead, she went directly to individual elected officials and threatened their personal political survival — because they had publicly supported Black voting rights.

A Loyola University ethics professor, Dane Ciolino, told the Times-Picayune that Murrill’s letters entered “uncharted territory” and that everybody needs to calm down and let the courts handle it. Procedurally, that’s reasonable advice. Strategically, it misses the point entirely.

Murrill doesn’t need to actually remove anyone for this to work. The threat itself is the weapon. The message going out to every elected official in Louisiana — and in every state where a Republican attorney general is watching — is this: stand up for Black votes and we will make your career the price. You don’t have to be removed. You just have to be afraid. Furthermore, once officials are afraid, they go quiet. They stop acting. They stop speaking. They stop urging. They stop aiding.

That is precisely what Section 11(b) was written to stop. And what Murrill did fits the statute’s plain language with disturbing precision.

Why This Could Be the Shot That Finishes the VRA

If Duncan’s federal case, Napoleon’s lawsuit, Murrill’s usurper letters, and the council resolutions generate a circuit split — or if Murrill actually moves to remove an official and that official fights back — this goes to the Supreme Court. And this Court will then be asked a direct question: does a state attorney general threatening elected officials with removal for defending a Black community’s election constitute actionable intimidation under Section 11(b)?

Given where this Court has been moving, I would not count on the right answer.

Think about what happens if they rule Murrill’s way. If the Court narrows Section 11(b) to require proof of racial intent, or rules that threatening officials rather than individual voters falls outside its scope, or decides a state AG acting under color of law has immunity — then it’s over. The last protection is gone. Every state government in the country gets a roadmap: eliminate the office after the election, transfer the duties, claim no vacancy exists, then threaten anyone who objects. If local officials don’t fold, go after their seats too.

That roadmap does not stay in Louisiana. It travels.

We Have Seen This Movie Before

We’ve written about what this looks like when a city lets it happen — what we called the Memphis Treatment, where structural maneuvers quietly replace overt racism as the tool of political erasure. Reconstruction didn’t end with one dramatic act. It ended with a thousand acts of legal pressure, political intimidation, and institutional manipulation — each one individually defensible, collectively catastrophic. Black men lost offices they had won. Black communities lost the political power they had built. It then took a hundred years and a movement that transformed this country to begin taking it back.

The Voting Rights Act was the legal monument to that movement. A president signed it knowing exactly what it would cost him politically. People marched and were beaten and were killed so that their votes would mean something.

And right now, in 2026, a Louisiana attorney general is threatening to remove elected officials from office for defending the people who voted.

Mayor Moreno said she will not be intimidated. Good. She shouldn’t be. Neither should the rest of us.

But let’s be honest about what this is. This is not a clerk dispute. It is not a fight about Act 15 or vacancy statutes or the election code. This is a direct assault on the last protection standing between Black Americans and a complete legal rollback of the franchise our people bled to secure.

Pay attention. This is the one that matters.