On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the case Louisiana v. Callais, holding 6-3 along ideological lines that the U.S. House boundaries of the state, drawn specifically to protect the voting power of black voters, constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In his majority decision, Justice Alito wrote that the Voting Rights Act “collided” with the Constitution and sought to clarify boundaries between founding documents and emerging law. But history will find that his decision did just the opposite, bending the powers of Congress to protect the rights of minorities based on partisan lean.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in private businesses, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned withholding sales or loans based on race. But the Voting Rights Act, which preserved the right to representation by creating minority-majority race districts, had hung on by the most precarious thread. Numerous times, Republicans had attempted to limit the power of this legislation, claiming that since black voters often voted for the Democratic party that their grouping constituted a partisan gerrymander and not a racial one. But in 1986’s Thornburg v. Gingles, the court ruled that “additional considerations” were in order to protect minorities.
The court in 2024 continued this streak of defense of the act, ruling in Allen v. Milligan (2023) that Louisiana, a state with 33% of its population being African American, must allocate two of its six congressional districts to minority-majority districts. This boosted Democrats’ fortunes in the 2024 election. However, amid the mid-decade redistricting craze set in motion by President Trump’s desire to hold the House in Republican hands led to the new Louisiana suit. With the recent decision, which declared that states must no longer consider the races of constituents when drawing congressional maps, numerous southern states moved to remove Democratic constituencies mandated by the previous interpretation of the law. Tennessee revoked the majority-black district around Memphis, breaking it up into three neighboring rural districts. Louisiana and Alabama committed to removing one of two majority-black districts in their states, with Congressmen in both states clamoring for black representation to be eliminated altogether.
The facts cannot lie: Democrats are hurt by this decision, influenced by a conservative Supreme Court and Republican president. But the effects of the decision could reverberate for decades to come, raising questions about Constitutionality and ethics in this polarized American political climate.
The question here lies with how flexible the Constitution is. By the definition of its codes, under its 14th Amendment, all people should be treated equally under the law, and under its 15th Amendment, all people should vote equally and be represented equally under the law. As such, it seems intuitive that the decision in Callais is justified, since it holds that Congressional districts should be drawn race-blind. But this interpretation proves impossible in practice, since no adjudicator can truthfully state that they had no understanding of living patterns of races within the states of the Deep South. Even if a Louisiana state legislator had no data on where whites and blacks lived, they would be able to conclude through life experience that blacks live in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Shreveport, and along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. That’s just the fact of settlement patterns over centuries. The second impossibility of the “blindness clause” of the Constitution is that it assumes that races will not unquestioningly support one party, which has proven false given that nearly 85% of blacks voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in 2024. This blurs the line between racial gerrymanders, unconstitutional under the Reconstruction Amendments, and partisan gerrymanders, which are legal in the states in which they are convenient for white-dominated legislatures and not spoken on by the Constitution, which believed political parties might never exist.
Convenience might be the key word in this entire argument. Southern legislatures have had no issue with packing Democrats into single districts within their huge states or splitting them between multiple districts to dilute their representation. When ordered to permit their representation in Congress through fair map-drawing, the states pleaded oppression of states rights. They argued, essentially, that since the white power that had dominated their states was being put under attack in the name of race-blind justice, that their “right” to disenfranchise blacks was under threat. The Lost Cause, which argued that slavery’s continued existence would have protected the Southern way of life, finds an ally here: conservatives want to limit the voting power of blacks because that’s the way it was a century ago. As such, Republicans bent the meaning of the Voting Rights Act: with “equal protection” for all races now meaning “race-blind,” Republicans can claim to be drawing Congressional boundaries in their favor on coincidentally segregated lines. It’s convenient to believe that partisan and racial gerrymanders would not be the same in this specific context. It’s convenient to use race relations as a front from which to keep failed leadership in power.
The most worrying aspect of this all is the accelerated nature in which it all took place. Just two years ago, the Supreme Court put a stay on a Louisiana ruling on this same matter, allowing its two minority-majority congressional districts to stand as according to the Voting Rights Act. But just as soon as President Trump demanded that Republicans find more opportunities for seat pickups, the Supreme Court opened itself to hearing arguments on the matter, with all conservative justices eventually finding for the plaintiff. It has been well documented how Trump has effectively circumvented Congress to pass his platform. The Republicans who dominate both chambers have given little scrutiny to his spending bills and cabinet appointments, and have also refused to check his power in other ways such as invoking the War Powers Act to limit his actions in Iran. They have allowed him to sign executive orders completely changing the operations of the US government overnight. It was believed that the judiciary was the one branch of government still standing, but one would be forgiven for asking if the courts are really independent of the president’s sprawling grasp.
As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his 2000 Bush v. Gore dissent, the real loser of the case was “the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” Congressional districts will change hands, but they have before and are liable to have their boundaries altered again. Democrats will someday retake the federal government, and Republicans will return, just as they have for decades past. But the wound in public trust of the courts to uphold the laws passed by prior Congresses and still valid in the present day remains deep. In the modern era, justices choose to rule based on partisan convenience rather than overarching justice for all, with Louisiana v. Callais being an example of that precedent.
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