SCOTUS Gutted the Voting Rights Act. Billionaires Ordered It. Democrats Allowed It. Working People Will Fight Back.
Photo Credit: ACLU
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court finished a job that billionaires started decades ago. In a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, justices handpicked by ultrawealthy political donors killed the last major federal protection against racial vote dilution. Billionaires and big corporations spent decades building toward this moment: stacking courts with friendly judges, gutting the agency that enforced the law, and letting their lobbyists write voter suppression legislation in corporate boardrooms. Democrats had the power to stop it. They chose their donors instead. Ramsey Robinson's plan to End the War on Black America includes a State Department of Anti-Discrimination with real legal power, elected by the communities that Wall Street targets, to stop these attacks before they land and undo the racist laws that billionaires use to keep working people divided and powerless.
What Billionaires and Big Corporations Built
194 California billionaires hoard $1.2 trillion while half of California lives paycheck to paycheck. That kind of concentrated wealth requires concentrated political power to protect it — and gutting the Voting Rights Act is exactly how they protect it.
The Heritage Foundation is a political organization funded by billionaires that has spent decades building the legal machinery to dismantle voting rights. Their election law director Hans von Spakovsky published the exact legal argument the Supreme Court majority adopted, just months before the ruling dropped. The three justices who provided the deciding votes, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, were selected directly from a list compiled by Heritage and its allies in the right-wing legal network.
Before the ruling landed, the Trump administration had already gutted the agency that enforced the VRA. By May 2025, 75 percent of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division attorneys had been fired. More than 200 former DOJ attorneys publicly condemned the destruction of their division. The court attack and the enforcement attack were not separate. They were two phases of one plan.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest corporate lobby in Washington, has donated more than $116 million to political candidates, mostly Republicans, since 1998. A group called ALEC, funded by some of America's biggest corporations, lets those companies write voter suppression bills in private and ship them directly to Republican state legislators. In 2021, one of their directors was caught on tape: "In some cases, we actually draft them for them." The corporations behind all of this, from fossil fuel billionaires to Wall Street banks, have one goal: keep working people out of power. They do not hide it. They just pay lawyers and lobbyists to say it for them.
60 Years of Gains. Democrats Had the Power to Protect Them. They Chose Not To.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not a gift from the Democratic Party. It was won by Black Americans who faced clubs, fire hoses, and bullets and refused to stop. Their struggle was so powerful and so righteous that Congress could not ignore it. And because of what Black freedom fighters built, the VRA's protections extended to every community that had been locked out of the ballot.
When the 1975 extension passed, it covered Puerto Rican New Yorkers blocked from voting by English-only literacy tests. It brought Mexican American communities in Texas under federal protection for the first time, after activists like Modesto Rodriguez were beaten nearly to death by police just for organizing voters to testify before Congress. It protected Native American communities. It protected Asian American working people shut out by English-only ballots. Every community the VRA shielded knew what Black Americans fighting for the ballot already knew: poll taxes were economic weapons. English-only elections targeted immigrant workers. Remote polling places were designed to stop poor people from voting. The VRA was a weapon for all working people, built on a foundation of Black resistance that refused to be broken.
Democrats had the power to protect all of it. In 2021 and 2022, they controlled the Senate, the House, and the White House at the same time. They could have changed the Senate rules and passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. They chose not to. Democratic senators who had collected millions from Wall Street donors voted to protect the filibuster instead. The bill passed the House. It died in the Senate. Democrats let it die.
After the April 29 ruling, Democratic leaders issued statements and announced task forces. Legal experts immediately confirmed: even if Democrats win back Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028, any new VRA legislation would be struck down by the same wealthy, unelected judges. Billionaires spent 40 years building this trap. Democrats are now promising to pass legislation those same judges will immediately demolish.
That is not a strategy. That is theater for their fundraising emails.
A party funded by the same billionaires and corporations funding the attack cannot be an unconditional defender of working people's rights. That is not an accusation. It is arithmetic.
Billionaires have two parties. Working people deserve our own.
This Is Exactly Why Ramsey's Platform Includes a State Department of Anti-Discrimination
"I'm a mental health social worker in the Bayview. I work every day with the Black families and working people that this system throws away. The Supreme Court just stripped one of the last federal tools designed to keep those families in the political fight. California cannot wait for Congress to fix this. We need institutions that working people own and control — not courts packed by billionaires. That is why I am running."
— Ramsey Robinson
Working people in California do not have to wait for Congress or the Supreme Court. When Ramsey Robinson is elected Governor of California, he will create a State Department of Anti-Discrimination.
This is not a committee. It will not issue studies. It will be an institution with real legal power, composed of elected representatives from Black, Latino, Native, Asian American and immigrant communities, women, LGBTQ+ people, and every group that has been historically targeted to keep wages low and profits high.
Elected by the communities the ultrawealthy target. Not appointed by politicians funded by the corporations that profit from discrimination.
Its mandate will be to act. To stop right-wing attacks on voting rights, housing protections, workplace rights, and civil liberties before they lock in. To strike down the racist, sexist, and homophobic laws that billionaires and corporations use to divide working people and extract profit from inequality. To undo the accumulated weight of those laws, systematically and without apology. The Callais ruling strips federal protection from California's own congressional maps and removes the DOJ backstop that California activists have used for decades. California has its own Voting Rights Act, passed in 2002 and stronger than the federal law — but it is not immune. The same billionaire-funded legal machine that built Callais is already working to dismantle state-level voting protections. A State Department of Anti-Discrimination would have the authority and the mandate to defend California's VRA before the attacks lock in — and to expand it.
Ending the War on Black America means full cash reparations, community control of police, and this State Department of Anti-Discrimination. Together they are a program for working people's power. Not just for Black Californians, but for every community that billionaires and the ultrawealthy have targeted to maintain inequality and drive up their profits. Part of a platform that guarantees democratic and economic equality for all Californians while stripping power from those at the very top and giving it back to working people.
Working People Have Never Won Their Rights Any Other Way
The Voting Rights Act was not passed because Congress decided to do the right thing. It was passed because the Civil Rights Movement made inaction politically impossible. People organized. People marched. People faced state terror and kept moving. They won.
Before that, enslaved people did not win their freedom because slave owners changed their minds. They won it on the battlefield of the Civil War, through a mass uprising that fused Black liberation with the organized power of working people across this country.
Every gain working people have ever made came the same way: through organized mass movements that built power large enough to defeat the billionaires, corporations, and politicians who profit from exploitation. The ultrawealthy know this. That is why they spend billions suppressing votes, busting unions, and keeping working people divided by race. A united, multiracial movement of working people is the only force that has ever beaten them. It is the only force that can beat them now.
We win when we build a movement — because when millions of us get together, the billionaires get scared.
The Time for Power Is Now
The Supreme Court handed billionaires a political weapon on April 29. Republican legislatures are already moving to use it before the 2026 midterms. The Trump DOJ has confirmed it will use this ruling to attack majority-minority districts from Texas to Georgia to Louisiana to Florida.
We cannot wait for Democrats to save us. They had the power to act and they protected their donors instead.
Register Peace and Freedom Party atramsey4gov.com/register. Every PFP registration builds the ballot-access foundation for the only California campaign that takes no corporate money and answers to working people.
Get involved atramsey4gov.com. We are building the movement that defends democratic rights and fights back against every attack the ultrawealthy launch against us.
Donate atramsey4gov.com. We are funded by working people. Never by Wall Street.
The billionaires are moving fast. The only answer is a movement that moves faster.
Join us.
