It’s a shame that Elbridge Gerry isn’t remembered for his essential contribution to our way of life. It was Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, who suggested just five days before the convention’s end that our governing document should include a Bill of Rights.

Instead, as Utah Senator Mike Lee has noted, the smallish merchant from Massachusetts was largely written out of history and is today remembered only for a clumsy political portmanteau that bears his name: the gerrymander.

Conjured up by his critics in 1812, the term slaps together his surname with the back end of “salamander” to describe the amphibian shape of an election district he carved out as Massachusetts’s governor to benefit his political supporters.

This brings us to yesterday’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais in which the Democrats — who love to gerrymander congressional districts in their favor but hate it when Republicans do the same thing — are arguing that a district redrawn by the Louisiana state legislature violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 2 states, “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

That language was originally meant to prohibit ballot-specific obstacles such as poll taxes and literacy tests, which were common in the Democrat-controlled Jim Crow South. But in a 1969 ruling, left-leaning [read: meddlesome] Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “The right to vote can be affected by a dilution of voting power, as well as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot.” This marked the extension of the Voting Rights Act from purely protecting voting rights to more broadly protecting electoral outcomes.

Since then, Section 2 has been extended to include the drawing of congressional districts based on race. Call it affirmative action for elections. As James Piereson writes in City Journal:

The facts are not in dispute. Louisiana was apportioned six congressional seats following the 2020 Census, the same number as the state received after the 2010 Census. The legislature approved a post-Census map with five white-majority districts and one black-majority district, similar to the map used during the previous decade and pre-cleared by the Justice Department after the 2010 Census. The legislature did not expect a challenge to its revised map.

Blacks, though, as the plaintiffs in the case pointed out, make up 30% of Louisiana’s population, and therefore should have their voting power spread across two districts instead of just one. So the plaintiffs, er, helpfully offered a redrawn congressional map.

“But,” as Piereson continues, “rather than accepting the map suggested by the plaintiffs, the legislature drew its own map with the goal of protecting influential Republican representatives, notably Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Steve Scalise.”

The result was a narrow and weirdly diagonal Sixth Congressional District that stretched 250 miles from Shreveport to Baton Rouge — a district that looked similarly contorted to the ones that the Supreme Court had ruled against in previous gerrymandering cases. Indeed, a three-judge panel in Louisiana ruled against the legislature’s map, calling it a racial gerrymander.

But the impossible question facing the justices is this: What constitutes a legal political gerrymander, and what constitutes an illegal racial gerrymander? Clearly, logically, given that blacks tend to vote 90% Democrat, the two have a profound and unavoidable overlap.

Thanks, Warren Court, for making a mess of things.

Yesterday’s oral arguments didn’t help clarify matters. As SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe writes:

It was not clear at oral arguments on Monday how the Supreme Court will rule. … Several of the court’s conservative justices expressed skepticism about the map and about whether the 2022 ruling on which Louisiana relied to justify the creation of a second majority-Black district in the state was actually correct, but it was unclear whether those concerns would be enough to uphold the lower court’s ruling.

According to Piereson, this case “looks less like a battle over minority voting rights and more like a typical partisan dustup over district lines.” Furthermore, he sees it as an opportunity for the High Court to restore Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to its rightful place — as a guarantor of minority voting rights rather than a murky extension into other realms. “In the process,” he says, “the Court could play a part in redirecting the country onto a path where the colorblind ideals of the civil rights revolution are honored not only in partisan rhetoric, but in practice.”

Finally, a word about the Democrats’ rank hypocrisy when it comes to gerrymandering. Oh, they’re quick to complain in Louisiana and Alabama and North Carolina, where Republicans control the state legislatures and thereby control the ability to redistrict, but they’re strangely silent in Democrat-dominated states. Last year in New York, for example, Republicans won 42% of the congressional popular vote but just 27% of the House seats. In Illinois, the disparity was far worse — the GOP won 47% of the House vote but just 18% of the House seats. And in hugely populous California, Republicans won 39% of the House vote but just 17% of the House seats.

In a House that Republicans control by a razor-thin margin, the apportionment disparity in California alone accounts for 11 congressional seats.

So, Democrats, spare us the sanctimony in Louisiana.