A Civil Rights Revolution Goes Down the Drain

This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a clinical trial of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here.

The Voting Rights Act — a pinnacle of the civil rights movement of the 1960s — has been on life support ever since the Supreme Court first crippled one of its main provisions in 2013. For more than a decade, the law has been hooked up to a ventilator, its limbs atrophying and its heartrate weak. But what happened on Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais is the equivalent of pulling the plug. In a 6-3 decision, the justices effectively handed Republican-controlled states a legislative eraser to remove majority-minority districts.