The battle over Reconstruction is back before the Supreme Court

The modern fights over voting rights, redistricting, birthright citizenship, equal protection, federal enforcement authority and even the meaning of originalism itself flow from Reconstruction.

They are continuations of the same unfinished constitutional struggle.

And once again, Alabama stands at the center of it.

On June 2, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use the congressional map enacted by its Republican Legislature in 2023, even though a federal court had blocked that map after finding that it intentionally discriminated against Black voters. The same Supreme Court that only three years ago agreed Alabama’s congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act has now changed the legal ground beneath the case.

That is a constitutional warning.

In 2023, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that Alabama’s congressional map diluted Black voting strength and required the state to create a second district where Black voters had a fair opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. Alabama did not accept that command. Instead, the Legislature passed another map with only one majority-Black district. A three-judge federal court rejected that effort and imposed a remedial map, which Alabama used in the 2024 congressional election.

Now the Supreme Court has stepped in again, this time allowing Alabama’s 2023 map to govern the 2026 elections.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote in dissent that the court had chosen “chaos” and rewarded Alabama’s defiance of earlier court orders. Her dissent accused the state of entrenching racial discrimination rather than remedying it.

That is the old struggle in modern dress.

The question is whether the promise of political equality, secured through the Reconstruction Amendments and later enforced through the Voting Rights Act, still has enough force to stop a state from weakening Black political representation.

For now, the court has allowed Alabama’s answer to stand.

That fight follows the long shadow of Shelby County v. Holder, where the Supreme Court disabled the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system by striking down the coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions had to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws.

For Alabama, Shelby County was never abstract. It removed a federal safeguard created precisely because states with long histories of racial discrimination had repeatedly used election laws, district lines and procedural barriers to weaken Black political power.

That was the lesson of the 15th Amendment.

That was the lesson of Selma.

That was the lesson of the Voting Rights Act.

And it is a lesson Alabama has never allowed the country to forget.

The Voting Rights Act was an extraordinary statute. It was Congress finally using the enforcement power promised by the Reconstruction Amendments. It made Reconstruction’s constitutional promise real after nearly a century of evasion, terror, disfranchisement and judicial retreat.

Weakening that law reopens the central question Reconstruction tried to settle: whether states that dilute minority political power can be trusted to police themselves.

Birthright citizenship gives this same struggle another front.

The 14th Amendment begins with a command: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. That sentence was written after the Civil War to settle a question the old Constitution had failed to answer honestly.

Who belongs?

Now, that principle is again being challenged before the Supreme Court in litigation over President Donald Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship for certain children born in the United States.

That case has not yet been decided, but the fact that the first sentence of the 14th Amendment is again being tested is itself revealing.

One case asks who may vote with meaningful power.

The other asks who belongs at all.

They are two fronts in the same old constitutional war.

And that is why the modern language of originalism must be examined with care.

If originalism takes the Constitution seriously, then it must take Reconstruction seriously. The year 1868 must matter as much as 1787. The 14th Amendment must be treated as more than a footnote to the founding document. It was a correction to it. The 15th Amendment must be treated as more than a symbolic gesture. It was a command born from the knowledge that states had used law, violence and custom to deny Black citizens political power.

When originalism speaks loudly of the founding while whispering about Reconstruction, it risks becoming something far more convenient than true.

It risks restoring the constitutional assumptions Reconstruction was designed to overcome.

That is the danger many Americans feel but cannot always name.

They see rights once described as settled being reopened, federal protections treated with suspicion and states asserting broader control over voting, citizenship, schools, bodies, speech and private life. They feel liberty being narrowed from a constitutional promise into a permission slip.

Not long ago, the great moral movement of American law seemed to be toward inclusion, equality, a fuller meaning of liberty and the long-delayed fulfillment of the words that all are created equal.

Now, the movement feels different: more rigid, more punitive, more suspicious of federal protection and more willing to let states decide whose rights matter and whose rights may be diminished.

That resembles a return to the Constitution before Reconstruction remade it.

That distinction is everything.

The Reconstruction Constitution was born from a terrible truth: States cannot always be trusted to protect the rights of those they wish to exclude. That was the lesson of slavery. It was the lesson of Black Codes. It was the lesson of Jim Crow. It was the lesson of Selma. It is the lesson Alabama keeps teaching the nation, whether the nation wants to learn it or not.

The Civil War settled the question of secession.

It left the question of equality unresolved.

Reconstruction tried to answer that question. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments placed a new command at the center of American law: Freedom, citizenship and political participation could no longer be left entirely to the mercy of state power.

That command is once again under strain.

So when the Supreme Court narrows voting protections, is asked to weigh the reach of birthright citizenship or treats federal enforcement power as suspect, it is doing more than interpreting isolated clauses. It is deciding whether Reconstruction’s constitutional transformation still has force.

And if it does not, then Americans must confront what that means.

Freedom is secure only when institutions are willing to defend it.

The battle over Reconstruction never truly ended.

It stands before the Supreme Court again.

The question now is whether America still has the courage, wisdom and will to live under the Constitution Reconstruction gave us.