WASHINGTON (LN) — In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court issued a decision by Justice Samuel Alito that legal scholar Carolyn Shapiro of SCOTUSblog describes as effectively overruling the provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to ensure minority voters have meaningful representation in multimember elected bodies.
Shapiro argues in a recent analysis that the ruling turns the Reconstruction Amendments into vehicles for race discrimination and drastically restricts Congress’ authority under the 15th Amendment. She notes that the decision effectively reverses a 2023 case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, and turns two of Alito’s dissents into law.
The ruling has already triggered yet another round of congressional redistricting to eliminate districts drawn to comply with Section 2, thereby eliminating a slew of safe Democratic seats, according to Shapiro. The impact at the state and local level is expected to be extreme.
In Callais, the Court dramatically changed the burden on Section 2 plaintiffs who challenge redistricting. Before the ruling, plaintiffs had to show it was possible to draw a different map providing minority voters with at least one additional majority-minority district.
Callais makes that precondition all but impossible to meet by requiring illustrative maps to meet not only traditional districting criteria but also the state’s specified political goals.
If a state’s aims include a target partisan distribution of voters or a specific margin of victory for certain incumbents, the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps must achieve these goals just as well, the Court ruled.
Tennessee has already acted on the decision. The legislature has drawn new maps to eliminate the only Congressional seat held by a Democrat, creating nine safe Republican districts.
The state did so by eliminating the district that included the majority-Black county surrounding Memphis. That area has now been split into several different districts, in all of which Black voters are a minority.
Under Callais, Section 2 challengers must provide an illustrative map that provides for a minority-majority district and achieves the goal of an all-Republican Congressional delegation just as well as the legislature’s map.
This requirement elevates the protection of partisan gerrymandering to a quasi-constitutional level, Shapiro writes.
The ruling contradicts the Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that extreme partisan gerrymandering was not a question federal courts could address because there were no judicially manageable standards.
The Callais majority apparently thinks courts will be able to tell when an illustrative map’s partisan gerrymandering hasn’t gone far enough, requiring courts to decide if the map is gerrymandered enough to meet the state’s partisan goals as effectively as the state’s own map, Shapiro notes.
Legal scholars argue that Democrats should turn to the guarantee clause, which provides that the United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a Republican Form of Government, to ameliorate the harm.
The clause provides an opportunity for Congress to outlaw partisan gerrymandering for state legislatures, which it has not previously attempted.
Such legislation would not replace the VRA but would ameliorate some of the worst immediate effects of Callais because minority voters, especially in the South, are disproportionately being excluded from representation by partisan gerrymandering.
Pro-democracy states can also take action inspired by the guarantee clause, such as passing trigger laws to eliminate partisan gerrymandering if a critical mass of other states do so.
Carolyn Shapiro, a professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, wrote that the fight for multiracial democracy requires deep tenacity and creativity.
"There are no constitutional magic wands, no perfect laws that will restore us on a path to robust multiracial democracy," Shapiro wrote.