New York University law professor and MS NOW contributor Melissa Murray joined Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson for a conversation about the Supreme Court’s consequential recent rulings. This includes the recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais case, which Murray argues has dealt a crippling blow to the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for Southern states to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts. Murray and Gibson also discussed her new book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, and what ordinary Americans can do to reclaim a document that was written for and belongs to all of us.
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Louisiana v. Callais Didn’t Formally Kill the Voting Rights Act. Murray Says It Effectively Did.
Gibson opened by asking Murray whether she agreed with the assessment of attorney Anne P. Mitchell — interviewed previously on Raw America — that the Louisiana v. Callais ruling significantly weakened but did not gut the Voting Rights Act. Murray said she sees it differently.
“Justice Alito, who wrote for the six-to-three conservative super majority, basically said that he was not overruling Section Two. He was instead ‘realigning and updating’ the jurisprudence and the statute,” Murray explained. “And if you’re concerned that a federal court is updating legislation, which seems like a legislative and congressional function, you would be someone who has read the Constitution, because that is exactly what legislators do.”
Murray drew a pointed historical parallel to the Court’s refusal in 1992 to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision to underscore her concern about the Court’s approach. Murray noted that justices “changed the ruling enough to allow states to effectively legislate the right to abortion to the point where it was really kind of a nub of a right.”
“If they had simply overruled Roe, I think you would have seen massive public galvanization over that issue in 1992,” she said.
Murray said she believes the Court deployed the same strategy in Louisiana v. Callais in keeping Section Two nominally alive while stripping it of its practical power.
“It actually would have been not only more responsible, but also better for the public, if the court had just come out and said, ‘We are overruling Section Two of the Voting Rights Act,’” Murray said. “This sort of too-clever-by-half really protects and insulates the court from public outcry.”
Why Partisan Gerrymandering and Racial Disenfranchisement Are Inseparable in the South
Gibson noted that the ruling has already had real-world consequences, with Alabama moving forward with a 2023 congressional map that would eliminate one of its two predominantly Black districts. He asked Murray whether this is proof that the Voting Rights Act remains as necessary today as it was when it was passed in 1965. She responded that this was “100 percent” the case.”
“This court has a really weird view of racial progress. It’s almost like none of them are racial minorities — although one of them is, although I’m not sure the Black delegation is claiming Clarence Thomas these days,” Murray said, referencing the Chappelle’s Show “Racial Draft” sketch.
Murray pushed back on Justice Alito’s argument in Louisiana v. Callais that what occurred in Louisiana was partisan gerrymandering rather than racial discrimination. She argued the distinction is nearly meaningless in practice across much of the South.
“Throughout the South and in many parts of the country, partisan affiliation runs closely with race. They’re inextricably intertwined, such that many minority voters are also Democrats,” she said. “So if you are consolidating for partisan advantage in the South, you’re likely doing it in a way that disenfranchises minority voters.”
Murray also flagged the cynical corollary of this logic — that the remaining shell of Section Two could now be weaponized in reverse. “When blue states now go to redistrict to consolidate their advantages for the Democratic Party, what you will instead see are white voters challenging those redistricting efforts under Section Two, on the ground that they’re actually about consolidating advantage for racial blocs,” she said. “It’ll just be used the opposite way.”
Murray Calls on Congress to Pass a New Voting Rights Act
Gibson asked whether, if Democrats were to retake the House and Senate in future elections, passing a new Voting Rights Act should be a top priority. Murray was unequivocal.
“It’s past time for the Democratic Party to take seriously the threats to the right to vote and to protect it in earnest,” Murray said.
The NYU law professor and author also expanded on what she sees as the broader anti-democratic threat hiding beneath the racial dimensions of redistricting battles. She cited comments made by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) following Louisiana v. Callais, in which Blackburn reportedly said the ruling would ensure Tennessee remains a red state.
“Do states have a partisan affiliation? No, they are comprised of individuals,” Murray said. “What does it mean to draw your districts to keep Tennessee red? It means you’re not only disenfranchising Black people, which may be your goal, but you’re also disenfranchising white Democrats — anyone who is a Democrat.”
Murray urged Raw America’s audience to understand the issue in its full scope. “If Black people are the canary in the coal mine here, they’re just the first. This is going to trickle down. Ultimately, this is an anti-democratic move to consolidate partisan advantage. It is profoundly, profoundly anti-democratic. It is the exact opposite of what the framers of the Constitution, and certainly the framers of the Reconstruction amendments, wanted to see.”
What Can Be Done to Rein In the Roberts Court?
Gibson asked Murray about potential structural remedies for a Supreme Court that many legal commentators have described as the most partisan in modern history — including court expansion, term limits, a binding code of ethics and requiring justices to ride circuit.
Murray said the conversation needs to start from a different premise.
“We need to stop thinking of court reform as the nuclear option,” she said. “We’ve had a Supreme Court that has been of different multiples at various points in our history — six justices, seven justices. It’s been at nine for a long time, but it doesn’t have to be.”
On term limits, Murray said the idea is reasonable but legally complicated, since Article III of the Constitution guarantees life tenure for federal judges. She noted a potential workaround — a justice could serve a defined term on the Supreme Court but remain in the federal judiciary in another capacity — though any such statute would almost certainly be challenged and could land before the very court it seeks to reform. She also argued for more aggressive congressional oversight.
“We ought to normalize the prospect of hauling the Supreme Court justices before Congress more often,” Murray said. “Congress could certainly call them in and ask them questions — at the very least, questions about the fact that some of the justices appear to have emotional-support billionaires who take them on lavish vacations, while the emotional-support billionaires also have very cozy relationships with the kinds of regulated industries and groups that regularly appear before the Supreme Court.”
She emphasized that public pressure, while imperfect, has already worked.
“We only got that non-binding ethics code because people made such a stink about Harlan Crow being so tight with Justice Thomas,” she said. “These justices — they care about what the people think. All the court has is its own legitimacy. There’s no way to enforce its judgments with the military. All it has is this idea that when they say something, we believe them, because we think they are doing law and not politics.”
The Threat of an Article V Convention Is Real — and the Right Is Already Mobilizing
Gibson raised the possibility of an Article V constitutional convention — a process by which states, bypassing Congress entirely, could force a rewriting of the Constitution itself — and asked Murray whether she thinks it’s realistic.
Murray said not only is it realistic, but that elements of the political right are actively working to make it happen.
“There are people who are very excited about the prospect of a state-led constitutional convention,” she said, noting that conservative state legislatures have been organizing in pursuit of exactly this goal. “I think it’s one of the reasons why there’s been so much pressure to gerrymander state legislatures — to consolidate partisan advantage so that there will be a super majority of state legislatures that may be amenable to amending or rewriting the Constitution to lock in certain privileges.”
“This is one of the reasons we don’t talk enough about why the Rucho v. Common Cause decision is so alarming — the decision that said federal courts have no role to play in partisan gerrymandering,” she continued. “If you have partisan-gerrymandered enough state legislatures so that a super majority of them are red, then it’s on. They will write a whole new constitution, and who knows what they’ll do.”
Why Murray Wrote a Guide to the Constitution — and What She Hopes Readers Learn
Murray got the idea to write her book thnks to a viral Twitter thread from hip-hop pioneer Luke Campbell (aka Uncle Luke) of 2 Live Crew.
“Luke had a list of all these things that he wanted Joe Biden as President of the United States to do, and I realized probably three-fourths of the list were things that Joe Biden did not have any constitutional authority to do,” Murray said. “It occurred to me that Uncle Luke probably hadn’t read the Constitution.”
Murray said the problem runs deeper than any one person — it reflects a generation-wide gap in civic education that opened up after No Child Left Behind began stripping civics from public school curricula.
“We have a whole generation of people now coming into political maturity who literally have no idea, through no fault of their own, how this government works, or what they can do to engage with it,” she said.
On what she most wants readers to understand, Murray pointed to the original intent behind the document itself.
“This is a trauma-informed document. The framers wanted a government that works, but they didn’t want it to work against us,” she explained. “It is really a document that is about restraining government power, dividing it between three branches so that no single branch, including the President, can become too powerful and despotic.”
Murray closed with an urgent message: the Constitution is not merely a weapon wielded by those in power — it belongs to everyone.
“We the people have actually played a role in making constitutional meaning,” she said. “Back in the Gilded Age, people were so upset about income inequality and the rise of oligarchs... and they got a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to levy a progressive income tax. If this sounds familiar to you, it should. We the people can actually do stuff. We just have to remember that this document is not just a tool to be wielded against us. It’s something that we can use to change our own lives, too.”
Melissa Murray is a professor of law at NYU School of Law and a contributor to MS NOW. Her new book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, is available now from Simon & Schuster.
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