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

I'm Dahlia Lethwey.

The Voting Rights Act is the birth certificate of our democracy.

Louisiana v. Kelle is probably the most important case of the term and surely the most important variable concerning the future of multiracial democracy.

It's also one of those really thickety cases that dredges up decades of voting rights precedent, constitutional powers, swirling congressional maps, and so very much law

that it can be hard to comprehend the enormity of what is on the chopping block in terms of the

Voting Rights Act and almost equally hard to comprehend the ways in which the Supreme Court charged with interpreting and enforcing the law as written and precedent as created plans to eviscerate it.

Arguments in Calais took place over almost three hours at SCOTUS on Wednesday, and while I doubt many tuned in for all of it, the stagecraft was such that you could be forgiven if you got lost in the pretense that this was all a really hard and thorny new question.

This is not a hard and thorny new question. For all the obstruction and occlusion,

something important may be about to happen to the Voting Rights Act, and it is our obligation to

name it and to explain it and to lay out the stakes. To do that today, I'm joined by Jenae Nelson.

She's president and director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The nation's premier civil rights law organization fighting for racial justice and equality. LDF was founded in 1940 by legendary civil rights lawyer and the nation's first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall.

Jeanne is a longtime litigator and a civil rights scholar. She argued Calais at the Supreme Court

on Wednesday. Janay, Nelson, welcome to amicus. Thank you, Dahlia. Happy to be here. Maybe before we

table set this case and its twisty path to oral argument on Wednesday,

and even twistier path, the majority appeared to kind of want to take to reach the conclusion

it wants to get to. I do want to do some stake setting. It is just not usually the head of the

NAACP legal defense fund who argues cases before the Supreme Court.

And I wonder if, as you and your team made the decision that you would personally argue this case,

what were you thinking about the stakes of what is happening in this litigation in your own mind?

That is such an excellent question.

You are right.

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