SCOTUS Gutted the Voting Rights Act and Sent Southern States Sprinting to Gerrymander

Within hours, Southern states staged an assault on majority-Black districts, threatening to send Black representation back to Reconstruction-

I’ve said for a while now that this court was going to gut the Voting Rights Act. So when the court took a hatchet to it last week, I wasn’t surprised.

What I wasn’t ready for was what came next. Brace for whiplash. This all happened so fast, it’ll make your head spin. Here’s the rundown of what happened within hours - not days, hours.

Florida passed a new congressional map and cited the ruling by name. Ron DeSantis axed the popular Fair Districts Amendments, which prohibited racial gerrymandering. The result: Florida could end up with a map that gives the GOP four more seats, putting the state’s delegation at 24-4, Republican to Democrat.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency to suspend its primary election that’s already under way. People already have mail-in ballots in hand. Not because of a storm. Not a logistical issue or a public health emergency. It was so they could redraw the maps before anyone could vote. The emergency of Black representation in government.

Alabama called a special session. Tennessee called a special session. Mississippi called a special session. South Carolina put Jim Clyburn’s seat directly in the crosshairs.

That was all in 24 hours.

Even those of us who saw this ruling coming couldn’t see this: Republicans came prepared. There was practically no time between the decision and the action. This ruling was a starting gun.

So let’s talk about what Callais actually did, because the headline doesn’t quite capture just how damaging it is.

The court didn’t technically strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering. They just made it basically impossible to enforce. It’s as good as dead.

A little history for context: When congress passed the VRA in 1965, you had to prove intent to discriminate in order to prove a violation. Which made it nearly impossible to win because either you’d have to be able to read a politician’s mind, or hope they left a paper trail. It’s only recently that a politician would be stupid enough to do that, but I digress. Congress saw the problem there and changed the law in 1982 to get rid of the intent issue. You just had to prove the results were discriminatory. If a map diluted the power of Black voters, that was enough.

That’s what this court just undid.

So now, any state can draw a map that eliminates Black representation entirely, and as long as they claim partisanship, they’re good to go. Even in the South, where race and party are inextricably linked that parsing that is basically impossible. Justice Kagan said it in her dissent: Section 2 is now “all but a dead letter.”

It gets worse. In 2019, the court ruled it couldn’t touch partisan gerrymandering, either. They basically said “it’s a political thing, not our problem.” Now, racial gerrymandering is effectively legal. Partisan gerrymandering was already legal. So all gerrymandering is legal. The last guardrail is gone.

Let’s look at every state that moved in those 24 hours: Louisiana. Alabama. Tennessee. South Carolina. Florida. They’re not just targeting Democratic seats, they’re going after Black seats.

Every single one of these measures is aimed specifically at eliminating majority-Black districts. 35 out of 40 representatives of color in the South were elected in those districts. To say nothing of the fallout: we could be looking at white candidates winning 15 seats currently held by Black members of congress. Some projections put it as high as 19 seats flipped. You’d have to go all the way back to the end of Reconstruction to find a drop in Black representation that steep.

I keep coming back to this: this is exactly why the Voting Rights Act was written in the first place. It was a direct response to Jim Crow laws these same states imposed, defended and enforced. The VRA was the only thing holding them back. It was congress saying, “we know what you do when left to your own devices.”

Last week, they got their devices back. And within hours, these states were up to their old tricks, sprinting to disenfranchise Black voters.

They’ve been waiting 60 years for the opportunity, and the courts just handed it to them.

So, what now? I’ve been thinking about this a lot. (I wrote a whole book about it.) Here’s what I see. There are three different responses being talked about right now. I believe in all three, but we need to be realistic about what each one can and can’t do.

There’s the electoral response. AOC came out immediately and said Democrats need to fight fire with fire - redraw the maps in every state they control. Efforts were already underway in California. New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Maryland would all be on the table. I agree, we should be aggressive. It’s a welcome change to see Democrats finally mounting some offense after what feels like a lifetime of flaccid defense. My lifetime, at least.

But we’re playing catch-up. Republicans have had a decades-long head start on this. And there’s another problem here, because if Democrats move to maximize gerrymandering in blue states, they risk breaking up safe Black districts in big cities like New York and Chicago.

Then we have lawsuits. As quickly as those states in the South moved to tear up the maps, lawsuits were filed against it. Florida voters challenged DeSantis’ move under their own state constitution. Now, that’s worth watching - because state constitutional challenges are insulated from the federal court system. But that offensive is slow. It has to go state by state, and the reality is that many of those courts are republican-controlled, too. But this judicial offensive is limited. Because federal lawsuits are effectively doomed to fail, since they all end up at the same Supreme Court that just issued this ruling. You’re asking the arsonist to investigate the fire.

Finally, you have legislation. Democrats are pushing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Maryland passed its own state VRA the day before the ruling, which, credit where it’s due. Illinois was moving a state constitutional amendment and then paused after Tuesday to figure out what that even means now. All of that matters, and it’s worth pursuing. But a true federal fix requires winning the House, winning the Senate, eliminating the filibuster, and getting past a presidential veto. And even if we did all of that, we’d pass a law that would get challenged, appealed, and land at this court.

So here’s where I land on this.

These aren’t three separate problems with three separate solutions. We’re really looking at one big problem. Because AOC’s proposed electoral response can be neutralized by courts. The judicial response is the court. The legislative response gets struck down by the court. Every path runs right back to the front door of the same institution that just dismantled 60 years of civil rights law in a single ruling.

This isn’t whack-a-mole. It’s a maze with one exit, and that exit is blocked.

We can fight on all three fronts simultaneously and we should. But that’s like treating the flu with hot tea and a good attitude. It makes you feel a little better, but it’s not a cure. It doesn’t treat the root of the problem, which is an insidious virus that’s infected the entire system.

The root of our problem here isn’t the gerrymandered maps. It isn’t even this catastrophic ruling. It’s that we have a branch of government that has made itself accountable to no one, that has systematically dismantled every protection that stood between vulnerable Americans and the people who have always wanted to strip their power. And there is currently no mechanism to stop it.

So we need to have a real conversation about it and what we can meaningfully do about it.

The VRA was written because of what these states did. It took them hours - not years, not decades, hours - to show us exactly why.

We keep trying to tell ourselves that people can change, and that progress is permanent. This week was a rude awakening. The second the rules were lifted, Republicans showed us who they’ve always been.

We have an arsenal of tools on the table - redraw the maps, file the lawsuits, push new legislation. We should do all of it. But every single one will hit the same wall.

Which means the only real question is whether we’re willing to have the honest conversation about what this actually requires. I wrote about reforming the Supreme Court in my book, The Day After. I’ll link to it here. Because that conversation is the one we can’t afford to avoid any longer.

The VRA held for sixty years. It took Republicans hours to tell us everything we needed to know about why.