Spring 2026 the Supreme Court will decide a Voting Rights case, Louisiana vs. Callais, and in its ruling the Supreme Court is likely to disregard American history, American experience and the express language of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, when the court rules that southern states can create white congressional districts to the disadvantage of citizens of color.  Other Amendments may come into play. Voting Rights encompasses gerrymandering, racial unequal representation, eliminating representatives of persons of color, sex (women) and youth (eighteen year old voting), imposing conditions to vote, impeding voting registration, allowing individual states to interfere during elections, corruption and many other activities and deeds which encumber the access of Americans to the ballot box. 

The Supreme Court has explicit Constitutional restraints, prohibiting it from ruling on any voting rights issue. Congress sets the rules. The Constitution makes voting rights, political issues, not legal issues, which Constitutional Amendments give entirely to Congress:

The Fifteenth Amendment, section 2, reads: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. (1870)

The Nineteenth Amendment reads in part: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. (1920)

The Twenty-Third Amendment, section 2, reads: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. (1961)

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, section 2, reads: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. (1970)

Each of these Amendments changes the Constitution of 1787 which originally left voting rights to the states and the Courts.. Since the Constitution was ratified, Americans adopted and advanced these Amendments to “form a more perfect union.”

When Congress makes legislative choices, founded on facts and opinions about American society, it sets the rules on voting. Under Article Three of the Constitution the Supreme Court does not carry out those legislative functions when deciding voting rights laws. It has no power; voting rights do not come within judicial processes for judicial review.. The Supreme Court likes to say nonjustiability. Nor do voting rights come within the purview of any other inferior legislative body or court. Each court must follow Congressional Acts and its legislative history. Hence, the United States Supreme Court is unable to interpret the Voting Rights Act contrary its provisions and to the words of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Indeed, the Supreme Court must defer to Congressional legislation and enforce the Act favoring its legality and legitimacy from every inference and implication. The Supreme Court no longer has the ability to interpret legal issues of equal protection, states rights, or privileges and immunities, or other legal theories to be decided by a court. INSTEAD, each case involving the Voting Rights Act becomes a matter of Constitutional construction, and the only remedy action of any person has are legislative remedies in Congress.

The Rules of Construction include (1) reading and comprehending all words of each amendment to give each of them the greatest effect. (2)  Words, provisions and rules which add to governmental powers must be read in conformity with already present words, in concert with such powers in the original. And (3) provisions and rules that are contrary to or which do to meet the prescriptions of the amendment are superseded, removed and replaced. (4) An amendment may cause a reconstitution of Presidential powers under Article Two.

In 1789 James Madison attempted to eliminate the third general rule in Congress. He proposed interlacing each amendment into the Constitution in the area where it changed the Constitution. Contrary words would be deleted. Annals of Congress, August 13, 1789. Madison’s rational came from the experience of Virginia where a Constitution and Supplemental Amendments presented difficulties. Selby, John The Revolution in Virginia, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamburg, 1789, p. 103-104. The First Congress failed to adopt Madison’s approach to amending the Constitution.

To analyze the effect of an amendment, the court should compare facts, circumstances and situations before the amendment to those after the amendment. Along with the Fifteenth Amendment the effect of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) comes into play. Again the Amendment provides Congress has plenary powers, and the States have lost powers and authority to perform or do an array of deeds and acts against their own residents after 1869: The Bill of Rights is extended to residents of each state. Residents have equal protection rights, which belongs to individual human beings. Due Process and rights to jury trials are guaranteed. And the right to vote and equal representation are civl rights. And a state can be penalized if a state legislature bars targeted residents from voting or from gaining full representation which acts might include gerrymandering, Section 2, Fourteenth Amendment:

But where the right to vote at any election for the choice of

electors, for President and Vice-President, the Executive

and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the 

Legislature of such State, is denied to any of the male

inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,

abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other 

crime, the basis of representation there shall be reduced

in the proportion which the number of such male citizens

shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-

one years of age in such State.  

Americans should observe the powers and authority of each state are greatly diminished. Every right, power, freedom and immunity is held by residents, each a citizen of the United States. Those rights, powers, freedoms and immunities are not States Rights, presumably existing before the Civil War. 

That issue raises old claims and arguments about States Rights, see the Kentucky Revolutions and Virginia Resolutions (both available online). Observe in its final form the Kentucky Resolutions are unlike the original which Thomas Jefferson gave to Wilson Cary Nichols for delivery to North Carolina in 1798. In the Report of 1800 James Madison responded to the opposition to States Rights in an analysis which is incomplete. The Fourteenth Amendment wiped away all States Rights issues. Today, residents, not the State, may bring lawsuits, individually or collectively. A State itself can petition Congress or it can contact its Representatives and Senators. 

The Fourteenth Amendment and all Voting Rights Amendments come from American experience, the Civil War. Today, Americans owe a debt to the 642,427 Union soldiers who were casualties of that War to save the Union, the Constitution and its framework. Thereupon, the Constitutional Amendments and the Voting Rights Acts should be given full force and effect.

Distrusting Supreme Court Justices comes from long and familiar American experiences. Thomas Jefferson warned his friend, James Madison, about wild, ill-balanced, unlearned, unelected justices with life-time appointments who would make political decisions and undermine or destroy the Constitution. While the Constitution was being argued and ratified in state conventions in 1788, other Americans gave the same or similar opinions. Fearful an active debate over the Supreme Court would derail the Constitution Ratifying conventions, Madison buried the best of The-Supreme-Court-Is-Dangerous essays, Brutus, so they were not collected and printed until 1971. PJM, vol. 10, Uni. Chi, Chicago, 1977, p. 200, note 4, citing William Jeffery Jr., University of Cincinnati Law Review XL, 1971, p. 665-777; 13 Doc His of the Rat of the Constitution, Commentaries, Vol. 1, St. His Soc of WS, Madison, 1981, p. 347, the New York Brutus should not be confused with Bruti from other states e.g Virginia. 

First-hand Americans have suffered from reckless, ignorant, bigoted, stupid justices using Supreme Court opinions to make political decisions and to force judicially-created law on Americans. Roger Taney, slaveowner of Maryland and Chief Justice of the United States, wrote Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) 60 U.S. 393, wherein that Chief Justice wantonly and recklessly expressed hatreds, biases and prejudices through hundreds of pages of the official reports. Dred Scott is the worst opinion the Supreme Court has ever published..

By breaching the Separation of Powers in Dred Scott, Taney wrote: Slaves were property to be moved anywhere within the United States without a change of legal standing; slaves, and perhaps freed African-Americans, were not citizens of the United States (hence being born in the United States now makes one a citizen); slaves were not human beings, they were property; slaves had no protection under the Constitution. Congress itself never had Constitutional authority to control slavery or control its spread into territories. Thereby Slavery could not be barred from any Territory or possession of the United States.

Taney was wrong about no Congressional powers to control slavery and limit it. In August 1789 James Madison had the first congress ratify the Northwest Ordinances which prevented slavery in the Northwest Territories. President George Washington signed that statute.  

The Dred Scott opinion helped bring on the Civil War (1861-1865). After the War, Congress overruled the Dred Scott case by passing the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment, forbidding involuntarily servitude, and in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment, forbidding state interference with all rights and freedoms enjoyed by Americans throughout each of the United States, and the Fifteenth Amendment. Each of these Amendments reaffirms distrust of Supreme Court Justices by moving powers, authority and jurisdiction to Congress: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Replacing the collective thinking of Congress and the President with that of a judicial majority, the Supreme Court Justices, today, advocate a return to the glory years of Roger Taney.  In a recent voting rights case in 2025 the Supreme Court asked on March 2, 2023 for further briefing to consider a legal theory – Independent State Legislative Doctrine. Does the Independent State Legislature Doctrine remotely sound like it complies with restrictions in Amendments 14, 15, 19, 23 and 26, above, giving power only to Congress? NO!. The Supreme Court was acting as a legislature, breaching the Separation of Powers in the Constitution, using wishes, biases, prejudices, ignorance, and the narrow thinking of non-elected Justices to move and to delegate Constitutional duties obligations to individual States. That Court considered the Independent State Legislative Doctrine was legitimate and wrote an opinion, rather than give it a curt per cerium send off denying it completely.

Today, the Supreme Court in Louisiana vs. Callois is wondering whether to eliminate language of race and color from the Fifteenth Amendment, plus completely ignore instructions of paragraph 2 of that Amendment. 

However any Supreme Court opinion about Voting Rights should be 9-0 in favor of the existing the Voting Rights Act passed by Congress.The Court should make all inferences in favor of the Constitutionality of Voting Rights Act and overrule all contrary prior decisions. Thereby, the Supreme Court will take a lesson from Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers and stop Judicial Tyranny in the United States of America. Thereafter, integrity can begin to return to the Supreme Court..