The Republican Justices Want to Help Republican Politicians Win Elections
The Supreme Court just issued a decision making it easier for lawmakers to racially gerrymander their states. Republicans are already racing to take advantage.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court published its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, a (surprise!) 6-3 decision that at last killed the parts of the Voting Rights Act that the conservative justices had previously put on life support. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito provided Republicans across the country with a helpful instruction manual for evading the protections of a law known as the “crown jewel” of the Civil Rights Movement: Going forward, as long as lawmakers remember to offer up some non-racist justification for drawing maps that exclude Black voters from the electoral process, those Black voters will be shit out of luck.
Callais is the culmination of the life’s work of not only Alito, but also of Chief Justice John Roberts. As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Roberts was a strident critic of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that violations should not be “too easy to prove.” Some 40 years later, Roberts got to cast one of six votes to make that task more or less impossible, thus gutting a statute that he thinks Congress never should have passed in the first place.
On Balls & Strikes, I wrote that voters in most states would probably not feel the impact of Callais right away: Many states have already held their 2026 primaries, and even in states that haven’t, drawing maps doesn’t happen overnight. But the logistical hurdles have not dissuaded some ambitious Republican-controlled states from trying to clear them: On Wednesday, hours after Callais came down, Republicans in Florida approved a new congressional map that could help the party win four more seats in the November midterms. On X, Governor Ron DeSantis asserted that under Callais, District 20—the only majority-Black district in Florida—is an unconstitutional “racial gerrymander” that Republicans have a solemn duty to eliminate.
Other states followed suit. In Mississippi, Republican Governor Tate Reeves said he would call a special legislative session to draw new district lines for the state’s judicial elections, which Black voters had successfully challenged under the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana, Republican Governor Jeff Landry suspended the state’s May 16 congressional primaries, just two days before early voting was set to begin. His order will give state lawmakers, now armed with Alito’s get-out-of-racism-free card, the chance to create a new map with either one or, in their ideal world, zero districts in which Black voters can “elect representatives of their choice.”
On Thursday, President Donald Trump, who has been urging leaders in Republican states to gerrymander Democrats out of existence, posted on Truth Social that Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, too, was prepared to “correct the unconstitutional flaw” in Tennessee’s map, which already gives Republicans an 8-1 advantage. The proposed “fix” would entail cracking the city of Memphis, which is about two-thirds Black, across several GOP-friendly districts, thus handing Republicans a clean sweep of the state’s congressional delegation.
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, the leading contender to replace the term-limited Lee in 2026, has reassured voters that she, too, plans to “keep Tennessee a red state,” just in case Lee and company can’t get the job done before November 3.
If any of this feels familiar, it is because it is exactly what happened in 2013, when the conservative justices in Shelby County v. Holder began the task of dismantling the Voting Rights Act that they completed on Wednesday. Hours after Shelby County, which made it easier for Republicans to implement voter suppression laws, jubilant Texas lawmakers announced that the state would begin enforcing a strict voter ID law that the Voting Rights Act had blocked from taking effect. Mississippi and Alabama, which had been subject to the same statutory provisions that the Court hollowed out in Shelby County, did the same.
For all the effort that Supreme Court justices put into insisting they are not “partisan hacks,” when the Court resolves awful democracy cases, elected Republicans have remarkably little trouble understanding what they are supposed to do, and how quickly they are supposed to act. Typically, the Court leaves its biggest cases until the end of the term, in late June or early July. In context, it is hard not to see the timing of Callais as the conservative justices doing their best to give DeSantis and Reeves and Landry and Lee as much time as possible to capitalize on it.
None of these post-Callais redistricting efforts are guaranteed to succeed. Even if they do, once it is time for voters who are really fucking sick of Donald Trump to actually cast ballots, there is no guarantee that these changes yield the real-world election outcomes for which Donald Trump desperately hopes. But the all-out sprint to make the 2026 maps at once redder and whiter lays bare the real project of the Callais majority: The Republican justices are trying to help their fellow Republicans win more elections in more places. Every seat counts.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
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He asked Black voters what do you have to lose with him at President and his scotus picks. How about representation and voting rights? They say what have Dems done for them? Well they don’t do shit like this.
Releasing that decision two months early was a truly scummy and highly partisan move. Not surprising coming from John Roberts and the five horsemen of the apocalypse.