Gerrymandering 2
I don’t generally like to write about the same topic twice in a row, but 2 days after I posted my gerrymandering post, the Supreme Court completely contradicted something I said.
To quote myself: "In essence, [Rucho vs. Common Cause] protects the ability of a state to draw lines how it wishes outside of a few fringe cases" (Emphasis added)
That fringe case I was referring to was race due to the Voting Rights Act, which has been weakened by the SCOTUS in the decision Louisiana v. Callais from just a few days ago.
Please note: While I have done my best to be as accurate as possible, this is still only my opinion and I am viewing this from a progressive perspective.
Background on the case
Louisiana’s congressional map has six districts due to its population. In 2022, the district maps were challenged on the grounds that, while a third of Louisianans were black, only one district had a majority of Black voters. This meant that, come election time, black votes would be crowded out against white voters, who make up the majority of the other two thirds of the state. Courts determined, in this ruling, that the redistricting map ran afoul of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which reads:
"No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."
This broad wording is intentional. Following the failure of Reconstruction, white southerners sought to re-establish the racial caste system that the Radical Republicans had tried to destroy for years. This was the era of Jim Crow - segregation laws aimed at holding Freedmen to a very thin line through the threat (and usage) of violence. Democrats controlled the South, and many confederate enslavers just returned to business as usual once reconstruction was dead. It was the “legitimization of anti-black racism” (The Jim Crow Museum). This included voter suppression via poll taxes, literacy tests, and racial gerrymandering.
Southern states had done everything in their power to maintain the status quo. They couldn’t be trusted - not when they had spent the past near century after the passage of the 15th amendment to undermine it in any way they could. When writing the Voting Rights Amendment, the legislators discussed whether the rule should be about discriminatory intent or discriminatory effect. Ultimately, intent was deemed to be too difficult to prove in the courts, and would lead to more suppression of black votes.
So, Louisiana redrew their maps - this time to include two majority Black districts.
Louisiana v. Callais
I haven’t been able to find much information about the challengers, but multiple sources I’ve read say the challengers self-identify as non-African Americans. The basis of their argument was that the new maps, which did consider race when redrawing the district lines to create equal representation, was a violation of the 14th and 15th amendments.
But the big buzz about this decision is what Justice Samuel Alito had to say about discriminatory effect versus discriminatory intent:
"As the Court has long held, the Fifteenth Amendment bars only state action “ 'motivated by a discriminatory purpose.'... So a law that seeks to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by prohibiting mere disparate impact would fail to enforce a right that the Amendment secures. For this reason, the focus of §2 must be enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination." (Emphasis mine)
The drawing of the lines to create minority-majority districts for the purposes of proportional representation is what is being judged as beyond the intention of the Voting Rights Act.
Proving intent is a much taller order than impact because professional politicians are generally savvy enough to not say the bad part out loud. For example, the Republican Southern Strategy, which helped curry the white supremacist southern vote, was all about dogwhistles. They couldn't just say they favored segregation as this would alienate moderates. But they could say they were in favor of states' rights (which is used in the South in part to obfuscate the role slavery played in the casus belli), and 'law and order' (heavy incarceration). This is not to say all Republicans are white nationalists, but white nationalists do make up an important part of the coalition.
The voting rights act is not dead, but it is severely narrowed. In addition to needing to prove intentional racial discrimination, challengers using Section 2 must also show that any maps' impacts of racial discrimination is not due to partisan gerrymandering, which is legal.
The reaction to the decision has been explosive, as you can expect.
Louisiana has already made plans to redraw their map before the mid-terms. Donald Trump has urged other states to do the same. Because these gerrymanders will be drawn for partisan reasons rather than explicitly racial ones,
This may lead to less diversity in the House of Representatives over the coming years.
I'll quote Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the dissenting opinion:
"The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process."
Final Thoughts
We cannot be colorblind in 2026 - not when the specter of Jim Crow and redlining still looms over society.
The Voting Rights Act was always going to be a band aid on the gaping wound of systemic discrimination in this country. Our single member district plurality system is a relic from a period of intense de-centralization in the history of the United States. It is from before mass urbanization, from before industrialization, before the country as a whole seriously considered whether the racial hierarchy in the USA was wrong when stacked up against profits for the wealthy.
It incentivizes political parties to manipulate the internal boundaries of a state to yield partisan majorities, rather than provide actual representation to the electorate. This is crucial for a country which has, historically, disenfranchised voters en masse due to race and sex, and prioritized profit over livelihood.
In a better world, we wouldn't need a strong Voting Rights Act. But we don't live in that one.
Thank you for reading, if you made it this far.