05/21/26

5/21/2026

Suppose your Republican legislature is trying to carve up your mostly black Democratic congressional district and distribute its parts into two or more mostly white Republican districts? If you don’t like that, how do you prove that the legislature’s motivation is racially based (which is illegal) instead of politically based (which is legal)?

That’s a very steep climb today.

It didn’t used to be. For decades after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the courts summarily found race to be the deciding factor in such cases. Congress adopted the Voting Rights Act specifically to protect black voters from the governmental discrimination that whites had foisted on them ever since the end of Reconstruction in 1876. 

The courts protected districts that were “majority-minority” (the standard term for mostly black or mostly Latino), essentially as a way to right past wrongs that still prevailed. That started to change in 2013 with a series of three U.S. Supreme Court decisions that culminated this year.

The 2013 decision—Shelby County v. Holder—found illegal the Voting Rights Act requirement that jurisdictions that had a history of voting discrimination must get federal preclearance before changing their voting laws.

Then the second decision—Brnovich v. DNC in 2021—changed the decisive factor in voting rights cases from effect to intent. That meant that a challenge to a voting law change had to show that racial discrimination was the goal of the change. Simply weakening black voting rights in a district was not proof enough.

Finally, the third decision—Louisiana v. Callais, handed down just a few weeks ago, at the end of April—extracted the rest of the teeth from the Voting Rights Act. The Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional district map unconstitutionally established two black majority districts out of the state’s total of six districts. The reason? The two districts were illegally based on race—because they intended to favor black voters, according to the court. 

And what about political intent? Is that legal grounds for overturning a voting rights law?

Certainly is, said the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision in 2019—in Russo v. Common Cause—the Court found that partisan gerrymandering is not a matter to be decided by the federal courts. While it may be incompatible with democratic principles, as the court acknowledged, it is nevertheless the province of state constitutions and state courts to deal with.

So the Louisiana Legislature immediately reworked its congressional map to draw just one black-majority district, a serpentine creation that meanders from east to west across the state.

What it all means is that the Supreme Court has found unconstitutional Congress’s Voting Rights Act attempt in 1965 to redress discrimination against black voters.

A significant portion of Republican leaders and voters will maintain that the blizzard of redistricted maps drawn this year by Southern states, both before and after the Callais decision, are entirely politically motivated, and that race played no part. Some who claim that belief are no doubt sincere.

But evidence is strong the other way.

When President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the federal Civil Rights Act in 1964, the year before enactment of the Voting Rights Act, he said, “We have lost the South for a generation.” He was certainly right. The region had been known as the Solid South for its overwhelming Democratic support for many decades.

The “Solid South” nickname continues accurate today. But the parties switched places. Most Southern blacks became Democrats, and most Southern whites migrated to the Republican Party, where they have remained ever since.

There’s a reason for that.

Key conservative leaders in the Republican Party—like Kevin Phillips and Lee Atwater—quietly developed the party’s “Southern Strategy” in the two decades after enactment of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, consciously shifting Republican emphasis toward attracting Southern white conservatives, who traditionally had supported the Democratic Party. The Republican leadership showed itself willing to drop open support for blacks, and fish instead in the pool of conservative whites, of whom there are a great many in the South.

Who would have guessed there were so many political theorists among white Southerners for whom “devotion to states’ rights” was the supposed deciding factor?

The shift proved successful politically for Republican politicians, especially in the Deep South, which has remained dependably devoted to the GOP for more than four decades.

Southern Republican legislatures can, and do, claim that racism is no longer a factor in their state’s politics. They maintain that their only desire in redrawing their congressional districts is to grow the number of their GOP members of Congress, despite the Supreme Court’s admission that such political gerrymandering is undemocratic. 

The Supreme Court has made sure that it’s nearly impossible to prove them wrong. An unbalanced number of white-majority districts is no longer relevant for federal court challenges. And the racial factor is now employed as an argument in favor of the redrawn maps, rather than against them, by maintaining that the former maps were racist—because they favored black voters. 

The arc of the moral universe may ultimately bend toward justice, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, but apparently it takes some strange detours. ♦