WASHINGTON (CN) - The news of the Supreme Court's decision to gut the crown jewel of the civil rights movement spread like wildfire online and across television airwaves shortly after 10 a.m. on Wednesday, igniting a frenzied response to digest the ruling in the minutes after it was posted to the court's website.  

But inside the ornate courtroom on One First Street, the opinion was carefully read to a solemn audience of onlookers lucky enough to be there when the justices decided to issue the landmark ruling. 

Along the mahogany high court bench, the justices are arranged by seniority, starting with Chief Justice John Roberts in the center and then alternating in descending order of appointment from right to left. 

That seating arrangement put Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan side by side as they detailed the divergent and at times hostile opinions that divided the high court in Louisiana v. Callais. 

It took Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, less than 10 minutes to explain why Louisiana couldn't lawfully add a second majority-minority district to its congressional map. A lower court ordered the state to draw a new map in accordance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires minority voters to have an equal opportunity to participate in the political process. 

But by trying to give Black Louisianians more of a voice in elections, Alito said the state created an unconstitutional gerrymander. The eight other justices sat stoically as Alito read his bench statement, where he spelled out why the ruling should be viewed as updating, not overhauling, the court's precedents for the modern era. 

Seated to his right, Kagan didn't react as Alito characterized her dissent as "unabashedly at war with key precedents." She occasionally glanced at the clock, impassively waiting for her opportunity to speak. 

At 10:17 that moment came. Looking over her glasses out into the audience, Kagan delivered a firm but calm warning for American democracy: The impetus for awe-inspiring change that brought the nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality was now a dead letter. 

"The Voting Rights Act is - or, now more accurately, was - one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our nation's history," Kagan said. "It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers." 

Kagan characterized Wednesday's ruling as the last piece in her colleagues' decadelong project to "dismantle and destroy" the Voting Rights Act. While the majority disclaims it "in particular paragraphs," Kagan said, Wednesday's ruling made success in vote dilution claims nearly impossible. 

The lion's share of Kagan's bench statement was nearly identical to the text of her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, another Obama appointee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee. But her oration gave a succinct and straightforward assessment of what is to come from the ruling. 

Kagan said the court had decided that the country no longer needs the Voting Rights Act, effectively nullifying "this greatest of statutes" and usurping congressional authority. Without its protections, she worried that the court had "laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction," leaving them without an equal opportunity in the political process. 

Kagan predicted southern states would quickly begin dismantling majority-minority districts they were forced to create under Section 2. And she said they'd be encouraged to do so using partisan gerrymandering because the court has refused to review such claims. The result, Kagan said, would allow Louisiana to deprive Black voters of equal opportunity in elections, and give the state an automatic defense against any Voting Rights Act challenge of its actions. 

The districts created in the South over the last half-century to give Black citizens a meaningful political voice, "exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long," Kagan said. 

As she read, Kagan intermittently scanned the courtroom, looking out to attorneys, reporters and members of the public listening intently. In her last crescendo, she seemed to make eye contact throughout the crowd, issuing a final condemnation of her colleagues' ruling. 

"I dissent because Congress elected otherwise," Kagan said. "I dissent because the court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the court's decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent." 

Just over 30 minutes after the justices took the bench, opinion announcements concluded. The Supreme Court took a short intermission for bar admissions and then turned to oral arguments over the temporary protected status for migrants facing humanitarian disasters in their home countries. 

Listeners to the live broadcast of oral argument audio could hear Kagan's voice crack and turn to a whisper as she probed the Trump administration's authority to unilaterally decide when immigrants from a certain country deserved special protections to stay in the U.S. or be forced to return despite potentially perilous conditions. 

But audio streamers would have no way of knowing that Kagan had already spoken for nearly 15 minutes that morning. Audio of Alito and Kagan's bench statements was recorded but won't be released until October, per the court's custom. 

Source: Courthouse News Service