On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Voting Rights Act did not authorize Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-minority congressional district, ruling that the state’s map was therefore an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Two days later, on May 1, President Donald Trump notified congressional leaders that hostilities in Iran had “terminated,” even as the Strait of Hormuz remained largely impassable, the U.S. military continued to blockade Iranian ports, and no peace deal had been reached. The timing of the notification was keyed to the 60-day limit under the War Powers Resolution, after which the president must seek legislative authorization to continue the use of military force.

Aside from their proximity in time, these two events might not seem closely related. What they have in common, however, is that they are the products of erosion of previously established legal reforms.

The Voting Rights Act was originally passed in 1965 and has been amended and reauthorized five times since, most recently in 2006. A series of Supreme Court decisions, culminating in the one handed down at the end of April, have gradually hollowed out the law, leaving it on the books but largely unenforceable.

The War Powers Resolution was enacted in 1973, in response to news that then-President Richard Nixon was conducting secret bombings in Cambodia during the Vietnam War without notifying Congress. It was adopted after the House and Senate, by two-thirds majorities, overrode Mr. Nixon’s initial veto. Since then, presidents have generally abided by the form of the resolution regarding notifications to Congress, even while maintaining that it was an unconstitutional infringement on the powers of the commander in chief. 

Mr. Trump’s recent farcical claim that hostilities in Iran had ended, replacing the even more absurd contention by several of his cabinet officials that the 60-day deadline had been “paused” during the temporary cease-fire with Iran, can be seen as following in that line of thinking. The law would have been better honored, of course, by Mr. Trump actually seeking authorization for the war, but presumably he did not want to risk a vote that could easily have gone against him.

Neither of these laws are uncomplicated, and there are reasonable arguments on both sides of these debates. While I generally support both the Voting Rights Act and the War Powers Resolution, I am not setting out, in this column, to defend their constitutionality. Rather, I want to reflect on what happens when we abandon or ignore previous legislative settlements without actually going through the exercise of agreeing on and enacting new laws.

In the case of the Voting Rights Act, the practical effect of the Supreme Court’s decisions is that partisan gerrymanders are unreviewable by courts, even if they are identical in results to racial gerrymanders, as long as no one says out loud that race has been used as a factor in drawing the maps. While gerrymandering causes many other problems beyond disadvantaging minority voters, the V.R.A. was one of the last significant obstacles to political parties seeking to extract maximum advantage in redistricting. Already, in the wake of the most recent court decision, several states are trying to redraw maps even as primary races are already underway.

In the case of the War Powers Resolution, Congress’s inability—or simple refusal—to assert its own constitutional responsibility for deciding on declarations of war leaves us with the president able to exercise the full might of the U.S. armed forces on not much more than his own whim. Even if Congress had not been able to deny Mr. Trump the ability to go to war with Iran, some degree of back-and-forth engagement between the legislature and the executive might have helped reveal how little the administration understood or had planned for the geopolitical consequences of the conflict.

When we give up on the solutions that we have reached in the past without establishing new agreements to replace them, what we get are power grabs. A political party draws district maps to choose its voters rather than risking voters having a real choice, and then the other political party responds in kind in another state lest it risk seats by standing on principle. The president takes us into a war defined neither by a just cause nor by a coherent rationale about American interests, but by a confused set of goals and repeated declarations of success even as the reality on the ground becomes more dangerous and less stable.

In his famous pamphlet “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine argued that “in America, the rule of law is king,” drawing a contrast with “absolute governments [in which] the king is law.” The law, to be sure, is no perfect king—but it is a better ruler of a free people than politicians seeking their own advantage at all costs. As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence, it seems we need to be reminded of how we ought to be ruled.

This article appears in June 2026.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.