By declining to take up a lower court ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act.

The court announced Monday that it will not review an Arkansas-based lawsuit, leaving in place a 2025 appeals panel ruling that ends a long-used tool for protecting minority voters from discrimination under the landmark law in seven mainly Midwestern states.

That ruling found that in the states covered by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota — private individuals and groups do not have the right to sue to enforce what’s known as Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which generally allows voters with a disability or inability to read or write to get help with voting from a person of their choice.

The Supreme Court’s move comes almost two months after its conservative supermajority issued a major ruling that further weakened the Voting Rights Act, setting off a groundswell in redistricting across the country.

In May, shortly after that undermining of Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in redistricting, the high court decided not to weigh in on what the legal world calls a “private right of action,” sending back to lower courts two cases brought by Black voters in Mississippi and Native American voters in North Dakota.

For decades, enforcement of these sections of the Voting Rights Act has mainly been driven by lawsuits by private individuals and groups.

But after conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch issued a single-paragraph opinion in 2021 questioning a private right of action, Republican officials in multiple states have raised a novel legal argument: Only the U.S. attorney general, they contend, has the right to bring lawsuits under these parts of the Voting Rights Act.

Such an interpretation of the law is likely to lead to a dramatic decline in voting rights lawsuits because of the Justice Department’s limited resources and shifting priorities under different presidential administrations.

The case that the justices decided not to take up was brought by the immigrant advocacy group Arkansas United, which has provided Spanish-language interpreters at polling sites to assist voters with limited English proficiency. The group challenged an Arkansas law that bans a person who is not a poll worker from helping more than six voters cast ballots. In 2022, a federal judge ruled that the state law violates Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act. But after GOP state officials appealed, an 8th Circuit panel found last year that private groups, like Arkansas United, do not have the right to bring this kind of lawsuit.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military has conduced another strike against a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, immediately killing two people and leaving six survivors amid an ongoing campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America.

The latest attack — which now number at more than 60 — brings the number of people who have been killed in boat strikes by the U.S. military to more than 210 people since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls “narcoterrorists” in early September.

It is unclear if the survivors of this strike were rescued. In this case, and the strike on June 16 that left two survivors, U.S. Central Command said that they notified the U.S. Coast Guard. The US Coast Guard said they suspended their search for survivors for the June 16 strike a day later with “no signs of survivors or debris” but had no comment on the current strike.

As with most of the military’s statements on strikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, U.S. Southern Command said it targeted the alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes. The military did not provide evidence that the vessel was ferrying drugs.

A black and white video posted on X showed a boat speeding through the water before being struck by a visible projectile and then bursting into flames.

President Donald Trump has said the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with cartels in Latin America and has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States and fatal overdoses claiming American lives. But his administration has offered little evidence to support its claims of killing “narcoterrorists.”

Critics of the strikes have questioned the overall legality as well as their effectiveness. Part of the argument has been that the fentanyl behind many fatal U.S. drug overdoses is typically trafficked over land from Mexico, where it is produced with chemicals imported from China and India.

On Thursday, U.S. lawmakers demanded that the Pentagon release “unedited video” of the very first strike that the military conducted after reports emerged that the U.S. chose to conduct a follow-up strike on survivors of its initial attack.

Two men on the boat initially survived the attack that killed nine others, and they were clinging to the wreckage when the vessel was struck again, killing them. The White House confirmed the follow-up strike, insisting it was done “in self-defense” to ensure the boat was destroyed and in accordance with the laws of armed conflict.

But some legal scholars said a second strike killing survivors would have been illegal under any circumstance, armed conflict or not.

The Pentagon’s watchdog said in May that it planned to look into whether the U.S. military followed an established targeting framework when carrying out the strikes. However, the evaluation is focused specifically on what’s known as the six-phase Joint Targeting Cycle and not on the legality of the strikes, the inspector general’s office said.