This week, a U.S. Supreme Court majority tore the fig leaf off of a major strategic election tool used by Democrats and the political left, in declaring unconstitutional Louisiana’s congressional map in deciding Louisiana v. Callais.
The Court, in a monumental decision widely expected and inevitable to anybody with a passing knowledge of constitutional law, said the current district arrangement was an impermissible racial gerrymander. In 2024, the state had reapportioned specifically to avoid a potential district court redraw based upon a decision (on a notion underscored in the ruling as faulty) that it was discrimination not to have roughly an equal proportion of majority-minority districts as a minority group (generally defined as eligible for this treatment in a 1986 case) existed proportionally in the population.
The decision reaffirmed that when government deliberately intended to discriminate against people of a certain race because of racial animus that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act would provide protection against that. However, it went further to clarify that this statute could not be perverted to match the dictum of a far-left scholar who famously declared that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
For decades, the left has played a con game with the VRA. It wants to win elections and black voters, especially those of lower incomes/and or beneficiaries of transfer payments, are a useful tool by which to win these given the long-standing propensity of blacks to vote for Democrats, and particularly black Democrats, out of perceptions molded six decades ago continually cured by activist Democrats.
Of course, Republicans want to win elections as well, and they recognize that non-blacks have mindsets more amenable to their policy preferences. So, each party will want to draw maps in a way that distributes their supporters to be the majority in as many districts as possible – a permissible non-racial criterion (among others).
But the left increasingly has argued there are no non-racial criteria, proclaiming American society as irredeemably racist where only strong redistributive measures taken by government (until such point “reeducation” of the white majority had become near universal). And, unlike conservatives, it had the extra tool of the VRA to influence elections, by conflating race with partisanship. In other words, claims to draw boundaries using race as a permissible criterion were buttressed by alleging these were necessary to prevent discrimination, which had some legitimacy given past behavior of the white majority in certain areas (which, of course and ironically, were implemented by Democrats), giving the left an advantage over Republicans, who didn’t have a similar tool and made it easier for Democrats to draw advantageous maps at the expense of Republicans.
The problem with that strategy was as the years went by and laws and judicial decisions effectively neutered the ability of governments that intended to discriminate against blacks to do that, it became increasingly difficult to argue that mapping attempts that benefited the GOP at the expense of Democrats didn’t occur for reasons other than race. So, in order to reinvigorate the conflation of race with party – that maps advantageous to Democrats had to exist to stave off racism, even as objective signs indicated that election laws and administration had less and less of that component to it – another conflation was argued into existence by the left, a sneaky replacement of motive indicated not by intent but by mere outcome. In other words, in giving race its preferred position, one need not demonstrate causation by tying directly racial animus to a following government action but merely association that reverses the relationship – not intent defining the essence of the act, but a particular outcome assigned as related to the act defining its presumed intent.
This dovetailed perfectly with leftist argumentation about the irredeemable nature of racism in America, “proven” in that, for example, blacks tended earn less money than whites, that blacks compared to whites disproportionately committed and were convicted of crimes, etc. From that was derived the notion of proportionality reflected in the now-invalid map: by definition, any map whose proportion of M/M districts didn’t roughly reflect the proportion of blacks in the state – regardless of whether blacks lived in a geographically compact fashion, in what political entities they resided, how their interests related to others, among other criteria – must mean indisputably that racism lay behind that product.
Fortunately, the Callias decision invalidated that view, which has turned the left apoplectic, fulminating about an alleged departure from past jurisprudence, when all the decision did was this: it refused to ratify the racism-everywhere view underpinning the assumptions behind the left’s argument and so race cannot veto any of several criteria – including partisanship – permissible in shaping district boundaries unless a clear demonstration of racist intent (signaled by a weak relationship to these other criteria in drawing a map and a strong one to race) exists. As alternative maps adhering to these criteria could be drawn without resorting to race as the primary ordering principle, the 2024 map was thrown out.
Note of course while the left feigns indignation over the imagined discrimination that it thinks will come as a result of the decision, in reality it’s upset that it will lose power as a result of the fig leaf’s absence. Black voters to party leaders and activists among Democrats are a means to an end – as tools to support a far-left radical political agenda – more than a means to an end.
No more does race have preferential treatment unless overt discrimination is evident. As far as the state goes, the next step involves either the original court in Louisiana’s Western District producing a remedy map or the Legislature beating it to the punch and coming up with one, congruent to Callais. It also likely puts a number of local maps in jeopardy. And these consequences will be writ large across the country as, again, Louisiana is involved in policy leadership in this area.
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