What the Court Did in Callais—And Why It Matters

Absentee-by-mail voting was already underway in Louisiana’s primary elections when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Callais case on Wednesday. Polling places were preparing for in-person early voting to start on Saturday. But today, Louisiana’s Governor said there was an “emergency,” and that he would halt the primary election so new maps could be drawn. Those would be the new maps the Court authorized in the Callais case, maps that permit partisan politics to operate as a trump card, allowing courts to ignore racially discriminatory effects of those maps on Black and minority voters.

There is obviously no emergency in Louisiana. Just the chance for Republicans to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the House of Representatives and other elections where we vote in districts, not statewide come the midterms. In 2024, Trump lost because the courts refused to support his demand that they declare him the winner. Yesterday, the Supreme Court gave its party a legal path to secure victory by picking its voters, instead of letting voters choose their elected representatives. It’s unlikely that the conservative majority—the case split 6-3 along ideological lines—didn’t know what would happen as soon as they handed down their decision.

Ultimately, the decision in Callais leaves me with a question: Why are conservatives so afraid of democracy? Why are they afraid to let the voters decide elections?

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which is the law Callais is considering, prohibits state lawmakers from adopting redistricting maps that have racially discriminatory effects. Or at least it did until Wednesday. Louisiana created a map that added a second majority-Black district in the state. But the Supreme Court held that there was no compelling interest that justified using race to create the new map, and that it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down Section 2, which the plaintiffs, white voters, and the state asked it to do, it might as well have. Justice Kagan pointed out in her dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, that the majority opinion left it “all but a dead letter.” Until now, states like Louisiana understood they could consider race when drawing election maps to ensure they complied with the Voting Rights Act, which was meant to guarantee Black voters had the same right and ability to participate in elections as white Americans did. The plaintiffs here were a group of “non-African American” voters who challenged maps meant to achieve those goals, claiming they constituted racial discrimination against those white voters. Justice Alito wrote for the majority that “allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost any other context.” You can read the full Supreme Court opinion here.

“The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race,” Alito says, rejecting the argument that to combat racial discrimination against Black voters, courts had to consider race, which seems uncontroversial. Not so, according to Justice Alito, who wrote that it was not appropriate to add “compliance with the Voting Rights Act … to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Kagan explained why that made no sense. “Even after the Fifteenth Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, state officials routinely deprived African Americans of their voting rights. Through a seemingly boundless array of mechanisms—most of them facially race-neutral and among them the drawing of district lines—States either prevented Black citizens from casting ballots or ensured that their votes would count for next to nothing. The Voting Rights Act was meant as the corrective,” she wrote.

The dissent explains that while Section 2 technically remains in place under the majority opinion; it’s now virtually impossible to prove a Section 2 claim. “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic. The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks … But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law, so that it will not remedy even the classic example of vote dilution given above. Without a basis in Section 2’s text or the Constitution, the majority formulates new proof requirements for plaintiffs alleging vote dilution.”

She starts her dissent with a hypothetical:

“Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional district in a hypothetical State, subjected to a redistricting scheme. The example is admittedly stylized, but in its essence simulates the dispute before us, and clarifies the immense issues at stake. The district, let’s say, is a single county, in the shape of a near-perfect circle, sitting in the middle of a rectangular State. The State is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination, and its many effects, including in residential segregation and political division, remain significant even today. The population of the circle district is 90% Black; the rest of the State, divided into five surrounding districts, is 90% White. And voting throughout all those districts is racially polarized: Black residents vote heavily for Democratic candidates, while White residents vote heavily for Republicans. The circle district thus enables the State’s Black community to elect a representative of its choice, whom no neighboring community would put in office. But that arrangement, in this not-so-hypothetical, is not to last. The state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts. The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.”

This, she explains, “is racial vote dilution in its most classic form.”

Some Supreme Court cases are best understood through their dissents. The case that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County v. Holder, where Justice Ginsburg eloquently compared what the Court was doing to shutting one’s umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm because you hadn’t gotten wet yet, is one of them. Callais, in which the Court lopes off the remaining strength of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, is another case in that same vein.

Maya Wiley, the president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told me it was “Rampant racism out loud, with permission.”

Now, it is nearly impossible to challenge racially discriminatory maps in court and the door has been opened to a wave of Republican gerrymanders across the South, like the one underway in Florida, where the legislature voted for a new map meant to create maximum partisan advantage to Republicans the same day Callais was decided.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s the risk that in the rush to create the maximum number of majority-Republican districts, mapmakers may be forced into using margins that are razor thin, and stronger than usual Democratic turnout could allow some Democratic wins. Turnout is always the most important element in any election. Here, it will be the path to overcoming partisan gerrymandering.

Nonetheless, Fair Fight has crunched the data and they report that Republicans are likely to be able to create 19 more safe U.S. House seats, which they say will “significantly undercut Black and Latino representation in Congress and cement long-term one-party control even if Democrats win the popular vote.” They caution that GOP legislatures across 10 Southern states could redraw maps “to decimate fair representation and minority political power in state legislatures, while entrenching Republican power, which would likely lock out minority political power at the state level for a generation, blocking progress on healthcare, civil rights, education, criminal justice reform, and more. Similar impacts can be expected to ripple into school boards, county commissions, and city councils.”

So, what do we do now? We remember that giving up is not an option. Right now, it looks like Republicans have the upper hand in the gerrymandering wars. Democrats, who effectively used gerrymanders of their own as a shield to block Republican efforts to use gerrymanders as a sword when Donald Trump demanded red states create more safe Republican districts to counteract expected GOP losses at the polls this November, are sure to push back. Gerrymandering is an ugly race to the bottom, but Democrats will have to find an effective way to push back because you cannot save a democracy that has already been lost and Callais is a perilous step in that direction. Take the threat seriously, and remember that because gerrymandering only impacts district-wide, not state-wide races, your civic engagement at the state and local levels is more important than ever. Turnout will be the ballgame.

Major Supreme Court decisions generate instant reactions, hot takes, and a rush to frame the political consequences before most people have had a chance to read a single page of the opinion. But the real story is always in the text itself—in the reasoning the justices use, the lines they draw, and sometimes the questions they leave unanswered. That’s why I work directly from the Court’s own language, drawing from both the majority and the dissent and linking you to the full decision so you can see it for yourself. If you value analysis grounded in the actual opinions instead of the noise surrounding them, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to Civil Discourse. Your support allows me to keep doing this work carefully, quickly, and independently when these decisions matter most.

We’re in this together,

Joyce