The implications of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais overturning race-based voting districts are far more profound and far-reaching than anyone has yet realized.

This week, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, ended decades of race-engineering in how congressional districts are drawn. The opinion is likely not only to benefit Republicans by increasing their representation in Congress, but it also should end racial engineering in a multitude of local institutions, to the benefit of all. It signals the beginning of the end for progressive governance, begun by President Woodrow Wilson (ironically, a segregationist), whose vision conflicts with the Constitution.

Thirty-one years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that racial gerrymandering — defended as a means for ensuring proportional electoral results according to race — should not continue.

In my view, our current practice should not continue. Not for another Term, not until the next case, not for another day. The disastrous implications of the policies we have adopted under the Act are too grave; the dissembling in our approach to the [Voting Rights] Act too damaging to the credibility of the Federal Judiciary. The “inherent tension” — indeed, I would call it an irreconcilable conflict — between the standards we have adopted for evaluating vote dilution claims and the text of the Voting Rights Act would itself be sufficient in my view to warrant overruling the interpretation of § 2 set out in Gingles. When that obvious conflict is combined with the destructive effects our expansive reading of the Act has had in involving the Federal Judiciary in the project of dividing the Nation into racially segregated electoral districts, I can see no reasonable alternative to abandoning our current unfortunate understanding of the Act.

It did, however, continue until this week.