When Chief Justice John Roberts struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, he justified his action with a simple claim: “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.” Racial discrimination in voting, according to Roberts, simply wasn’t a major problem anymore. Section 4, and effectively Section 5—which aimed to protect Black voters—were supposedly unnecessary.

More than a decade later, it’s obvious that not only was Roberts out of his mind, but also that his doe-eyed ignorance about the level of racial progress since 1965 has actively enabled the country’s current backward slide into Jim Crow.

One need look no further than President Donald Trump’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) crusade. Through his rogue’s gallery of incompetents, Trump is systematically dismantling DEI initiatives across the federal government, further entrenching power in the hands of white men. In some cases, he is removing that power from overtly qualified people who don’t fit the new “white-is-right” mode of governing, and handing it to a cadre of right-wing television hosts, podcasters, and all-around cranks—not to mention the South African billionaire who doesn’t even go here, but who seems to think he is in charge of the entire federal government.

There’s certainly a lot of blame to go around for our descent into authoritarianism, but do you know who’s not getting enough shit for it? John Roberts. Because contrary to his claim in Shelby, things haven’t changed dramatically. We are in the middle of a massive resegregation of society, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal workforce in 1913. And had John Roberts left the Voting Rights Act alone, we might not find ourselves in this regressive backlash where voter suppression, racial gerrymandering, and relentless attacks on civil rights serve as a way for Christian nationalists and neo-fascists to entrench their power unchecked.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the singular piece of legislation that finally forced the United States to stop pretending that Black people had the right to vote, while systematically blocking them at every turn. Sure, the 15th Amendment had prohibited denying the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude (in other words, slavery), and white women’s favorite piece of legislation, the 19th Amendment, had finally granted (white) women the right to vote. But it was the Voting Rights Act (VRA), passed nearly half a century after the 19th Amendment, that finally saw the purpose of the 15th and 19th Amendments realized. Prior to the VRA, Black people were blocked by racist voter suppression tactics like literacy tests, poll taxes, and intimidation at the polls, particularly in the South. In passing the VRA, the federal government had put its foot down, banning these rampant racist tactics and forcing states to actually follow the Constitution. The VRA also put the most racist offenders on a federal watchlist via Sections 4 and 5.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act charged the Department of Justice with the task of babysitting states and other jurisdictions with a history of racist voting laws. Section 4 provided the so-called coverage formula to determine whether or not a jurisdiction had such a dodgy history of racial discrimination that it should be forced first to get federal approval before making any changes to its election rules. This was a process called preclearance, and it was necessary to prevent these jurisdictions from sneaking in new voter restrictions under the radar in an attempt to keep Black people from voting. And guess what? It worked—at least for a while. Black voter registration and turnout skyrocketed: As the Nation reported, we had fewer than 500 Black elected officials in 1965, and by 2013 that number had ballooned to more than 10,500—including this country’s first Black president.

Roberts probably thought it made sense to go about gutting the VRA early in Barack Obama’s second term. Obama was Black and he was president. Who could argue that there was so much racism that the VRA was still necessary? But when it came to eviscerating the law, this wasn’t Roberts’ first bite at the apple. Gutting the VRA became a conservative project almost as soon as it was passed. And by 1981—not even 20 years after its passage—a 26-year-old Roberts was already fed up with it. At the time, his cause de celebre was making sure that congressional efforts to shore up Section 2 of the VRA, which permitted plaintiffs to file lawsuits challenging racist voting laws, failed. In 1980, the Supreme Court had already weakened Section 2 in a case called Mobile v. Bolden, and Roberts, then a Supreme Court clerk, wanted to make sure it stayed that way.

Roberts believed, as the Court in Mobile did, that voting rights plaintiffs were required to prove that laws diluting Black people’s votes stemmed from racially discriminatory motivation. It wasn’t enough to establish racial discrimination by pointing solely to the disproportionate effects of a particular voting law or practice. In a 1981 memo to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts wrote that “incorporation of an effects test in [Section 2] would establish essentially a quota system for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation on elected governmental bodies.” (And we know how much conservatives hate quotas.)

Roberts lost that particular battle, but he ultimately won the war. By banning any voting law that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the U.S. to vote on account of race or color,” Congress amended the VRA to undo what Mobile v. Bolden had established. Results mattered. Discriminatory impact mattered. No longer would plaintiffs have to divine some racially discriminatory intent on the part of lawmakers. Nevertheless, Roberts persisted.

In 2005, the formerly young, upstart lawyer was elevated to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And by 2013, with his majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts was finally in a position to cement his decades-long crusade against the VRA. In Shelby, Roberts admitted that discrimination in voting still exists, but he balked at the notion that states with a history of racist voting tactics should be forced to get federal approval before being permitted to change their voting laws.

“Outside of the strictures of the supremacy clause,” he wrote, “states retain broad autonomy in structuring their governments and pursuing legislative objectives.”

Roberts had decided that racial discrimination in voting was de minimus and could no longer support the incursion into states’ rights. The conservative effort to undo the VRA had finally succeeded, and the unraveling of civil rights could begin in earnest.

The ink on the Shelby opinion was barely dry when states began rushing to enact voter suppression laws. Then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said that the state’s voter identification law, which was discriminatory enough to have been blocked by federal preclearance up until that point, would take effect immediately. (That law would ultimately be blocked in federal court.) Within days of the opinion being released, Mississippi and Alabama announced plans to enforce laws previously blocked by the federal preclearance policy. North Carolina also quickly passed a bill that so disenfranchised Black voters that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held it “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

We are in a period of resegregation where the prevailing attitude among conservatives is that only “competent white men,” as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie noted, should be in charge.

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote on X, the social media network owned by Elon Musk, in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

This is obviously absurd, particularly given the people Trump is elevating to positions of power. Trump’s crusade to rid the federal government of DEI is not about bringing some sort of meritocracy to the federal government that was missing before—it’s primarily about replacing qualified people with loyalists. And more broadly, it’s about targeting and removing people Trump views as undesirable from public life and denying them access to levers of power. Black people. Women. LGBTQ+ people.

And the best way to deny people access to power is to make sure they can’t vote for people who would provide that access. Political power starts at the ballot box. It starts with electing leaders who reflect the interest of minoritized people, passing policies that benefit these communities, and holding those in power accountable if they fail to deliver. Since its inception, the U.S. has perfected the art of shutting Black voters out. And while literacy tests and poll taxes no longer exist, polling place closures, voter roll purges, and extreme gerrymandering continue to ensure that Republicans never have to worry about being held accountable by the very people their policies harm. Were it not for sustained efforts to keep Black people away from the ballot, it might be possible to vote out politicians pushing Trump’s anti-DEI policies, for example.

It’s almost amusing how quickly this country has proven Roberts wrong. He claimed that the sort of racism that gave rise to the VRA was largely a thing of the past, but that claim is belied by the post-Shelby barrage of restrictive and discriminatory laws that disenfranchise Black voters. Since Roberts gutted the VRA in 2013, states have introduced nearly 100 restrictive laws, according to a Brennan Center report. And many of these laws are in states with a history of racial voting discrimination—states that would be subject to preclearance if Roberts hadn’t poked a hole in the dam that was holding back the deluge of racist laws. So when you see Black people standing in line for hours to vote, you can thank John Roberts. When line-warming regulations prevent people from providing water and food to people waiting for hours on end at polling places, you can thank John Roberts.

And we mustn’t forget that if not for Shelby, abortion would probably still be a federally recognized right. So we have John Roberts to thank for that, too.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated which section of the Voting Rights Act was struck down in Shelby v. Holder. The decision struck down Section 4, which in effect gutted Section 5.