This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithway. Lethweig.

Of all the challenges of modern legal journalism, surely the biggest lies in the temptation to cover cases, law, doctrine, and reversals as the entirety of the work product, without tying all that to the lived realities of those who find their communities and their lives reordered around those changes.

When the voices you hear most are those of the nine justices of the Supreme Court, it's easy to take their assorted claims and assertions about how the

court is irregular and nonpartisan and astonishingly and consistently above the fray as somehow

persuasive or even relevant. On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court's far right wing vastly expanded

its holding in Louisiana v. Calais to make it harder, if not outright impossible, to challenge racist voting maps put into play with the purpose of suppressing black votes.

It did this in a few mumbledygook lines on the shadow docket in Alan v. Milligan, a case it had already decided by both misrepresenting its own

holding in Calais and also the findings of the lower court panel that it chose to disregard.

The six justices who failed to sign the unsigned opinion, we have no idea of which of them

even joined it, will now continue to speak from their platforms in the form of book

tours and circuit conferences and televised speeches and remarks at European vacation spots,

while black voters across the country will see their voting maps carved up and their political

representation diminished, the news cycle will move on, and you will likely not hear much more about it because

there is not very much that is clicky about partisan gerrymandering. There are so many voices

you won't hear from after this week's decision out of Alabama. You may not hear from the panel of

judges of the three-judge district court that included two Donald Trump appointees, who painstakingly found that the Alabama legislature had violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black representation back in 2022, and who continued to reaffirm that decision until last month. You may not hear from the voting rights groups that organized and litigated these cases over years and years, or from the witnesses and the plaintiffs. You may not hear from the people whose votes and districts and regions will be sliced and diced on the basis of race after the court blessed that practice this past week. Back in the fall of 2022, we spoke to Evan Milligan, the name plaintiff in this litigation.

We spoke to him the week the case was first argued at the U.S. Supreme Court.

He would go on to win that case the following June.

For me, his words have come to stand in as an epitaph for what happens when you think about the American experience

as a sum of maps and power and cynical gerrymandering and horse race elections and Supreme Court tests.

He explained how and why Alabama's so-called black belt came to be a place where, in the face of maps and power and elections and gerrymandering,

...