There's a pattern worth tracing:

The Reconstruction Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments between 1865–1870 — the most significant constitutional expansion of rights in American history. Within thirty years, the Supreme Court had systematically dismantled the enforcement mechanisms: *United States v. Cruikshank* (1876) gutted federal prosecution of Klan violence, the Civil Rights Cases (1883) invalidated the Civil Rights Act, *Plessy v. Ferguson* (1896) ratified segregation. It took until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — nearly a century — to partially recover.

The VRA itself is now being dismantled on the same timeline. *Shelby County v. Holder* (2013) killed Section 5 preclearance. *Louisiana v. Callais* (April 29, 2026) has now effectively closed Section 2 as a meaningful enforcement mechanism.

I wrote a long essay tracing this pattern and arguing the framers built Article V — the constitutional amendment mechanism — as the intended response when courts capture and dismantle constitutional guarantees. The historical argument is the spine of the piece.

The current Court is doing to the Reconstruction amendments what the post-Reconstruction Court did in the 1870s–1890s. The framers built a mechanism for this.