Let's talk about Chief Justice John Roberts and how he's been gunning for the Voting Rights Act since the Reagan era

Before we can talk about what the Supreme Court might do to a Louisiana’s majority-Black congressional district — which will reverberate across the nation, including in Mississippi — we need to talk about the man sitting at the center of it all.

John Roberts has been Chief Justice since 2005, but his relationship with the Voting Rights Act goes back much further than that. He came of age during the Civil Rights Movement — a preteen when the VRA passed in 1965 — and spent his early legal career in the Reagan Justice Department, where weakening Section 2 of that same law was part of his actual job description.

In the third installment of an ongoing collaboration, Mississippi policy guru Hannah Williams breaks down the upcoming case in Louisiana v. Callais. Click the image for the full video; the story continues after the photo.

Roberts wrote more than 25 memos opposing Congress’s effort to strengthen the VRA in 1982. His argument, essentially, was that requiring equitable representation for minority voters went too far.

Three decades later, he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting the preclearance formula that required states with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting laws. His reasoning: the country had changed. The data was outdated. We didn’t need it anymore.

Now Louisiana v. Callais is in front of the court — a case that will determine whether Black voters in Louisiana are entitled to a second majority-Black district, or whether the maps drawn to dilute their power get to stand.