Combine the current Supreme Court’s loathing of affirmative action with its desire to enhance the chances of Republicans, and you get the inevitable result–a decision that will wipe out black representation in red states for the foreseeable future.
For me, the most notable feature of the Alito opinion, apart from the snide references to Justice Brennan, is the way it portrays partisan gerrymandering. The previous decision outlawing federal scrutiny of gerrymandering kind of sighs and shrugs its shoulders and regrets that nothing can be done; Alito, on the other hand, views partisan gerrymandering as a positive good, so anything that mitigates it has to be stopped in its tracks.
While Alito claims he is not disturbing precedent, in reality, he is obliterating both the Act and fifty years of case law construing it. The Act is now a dead letter except to prevent the most extreme kinds of Jim Crow legislation that were common in the first half of the 20th century. The segregationists didn’t have computers, so they couldn’t afford to be subtle, but their descendants do, so they can reach the same result in an apparently color-blind fashion.