The era of racial gerrymandering to segregate black voters in their own districts has been a long, ugly chapter in American life that vividly illustrates how a remedy for racial injustice can curdle into a racket that produces injustices of its own. One side effect of drawing districts for racial reasons is that it institutionalizes race-conscious politics while isolating racial groups from effective political competition. This yields politicians who get elected by racial appeals and stay in office through scandal and senility unto death.
Whatever sense this all might have made for black voters half a century ago, those voters are today so integrated into the mainstream of the Democratic Party — and, at the margins, more open to Republicans as well — that they ought to be treated the same as every other American. Certainly, black voters are nowhere ignored in statewide or national elections. Breaking down the race-specific walls around legislative districts is apt, in the long run, to produce a healthier politics.
That day is now here.
For too long, without a clear mandate in the language enacted by Congress, the Supreme Court has left states between a legal Scylla and Charybdis, simultaneously expected to draw race-conscious districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act and to draw those districts without considering race to avoid violating the Constitution. Like any charade that requires politicians to pretend not to be doing what they are compelled to do, this was unsustainable.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for a 6–3 Court along the now-customary ideological lines in Louisiana v. Callais went back to first principles: “The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” The Court’s redistricting precedents have led legislatures and lower courts to forget that “allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.” While “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act . . . was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it,” instead, “lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”
No more. Quoting a past opinion, the Court emphasized that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” It chided prior decisions for failing to adhere faithfully either to that general constitutional principle or to the language of the Voting Rights Act.
The Court hasn’t quite killed racial gerrymandering. Indeed, its decision in Callais makes explicit that the Constitution allows courts to consider race in very narrow situations where it is truly necessary to remedy discrimination. But those situations are supposed to be the exception, not the rule, and to be principally a judicial fix for too much use of race by the legislative mapmakers. Alito’s opinion is blunt in putting an end to the routine use of “majority-minority” districts and instead requiring a very high bar to justify the use of race. This is similar to how his 2021 opinion for the Court in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee laid down rigorous rules for claims under the same statute (Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended in 1982) that challenged state voting laws on the theory of disparate racial impact. In Brnovich, the Court demanded that suits show that a state’s voting rules as a whole actually exclude members of minority groups from voting.
The same is true in redistricting. The Court’s decision permits political gerrymandering of black voters, so long as it is done on the same basis as political gerrymandering of white voters. While racial minorities may be outvoted, so are all manner of other political minorities. So long as they are treated the same, wrote Alito, “a minority voter is entitled to nothing less and nothing more.” A court might, however, find that majority-minority districts are required where they would occur naturally and were intentionally avoided, such as a case where “the application of a State’s districting algorithm yields numerous maps with districts in which the members of a minority group constitute a majority, and . . . the State cannot provide a legitimate reason for rejecting all those maps and eliminating all majority-minority districts.”
Rather than solely pronounce an abstract rule, Alito — as in Brnovich — detailed for the guidance of lower courts and legislatures some of the specific implications of the Callais decision. For example, “in drawing illustrative maps, plaintiffs cannot use race as a districting criterion” — in other words, they can’t start from the premise that racial districts are required. Also, “illustrative maps must meet all the State’s legitimate districting objectives, including traditional districting criteria and the State’s specified political goals.” In seeking to isolate patterns of racial voting, challengers “must show that voters engage in racial bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.” In other words, partisanship should not be confused with racism.
The Court did not go as far as Justice Clarence Thomas (joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch) has long urged and end Voting Rights Act litigation over redistricting in its entirety. But the net result is apt to sharply reduce judicial interference in the traditional state prerogative of drawing legislative districts, so long as legislatures steer clear of race-conscious maps.
Critics of partisan gerrymandering should welcome this decision, too. True, in the short run, given the feverish partisan climate of the moment, Callais may lead some Republican legislatures to redraw their congressional maps (whether or not they can do so in time for the 2026 cycle). The decision’s history, involving an effort by Democrats to throw out Louisiana’s original post-2020 map, is also a reminder that intra-decade redistricting didn’t begin with Texas. In the long run, however, with race-conscious districts off the table, Callais promises to put Republican states on the same footing as Democratic ones in dealing with each state’s political minorities. That can lead one of two ways: either to mutual maximal partisanship, or to incentives to strike some sort of explicit or implicit compromise that produces a stable equilibrium. In either event, giving both sides of the aisle the same tools and the same stakes is healthy and brings political competition out in the open where voters can judge it, political actors operate under a single set of rules, and courts play a much smaller role.