“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” said Chief Justice John Roberts shortly after joining the Supreme Court in 2005. He was right, and it seems that he and five of his fellow justices followed that advice in striking down Louisiana’s racially segregated gerrymandering.

Indeed, Justice Samuel Alito echoed Roberts’s sentiment in his 6-3 majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais: “The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.”

In practice, however, distorted application of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has forced states — particularly Southern states — to effectively discriminate on the basis of race when drawing congressional districts, all while officially pretending that’s not what they’re doing. Numerous lower-court and even Supreme Court precedents have validated that. Yet Alito noted, “Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.”

Furthermore, “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it,” he said. 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.”

Thus, Alito concluded, Louisiana’s map was “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

As for the Democrats’ oft-repeated myth that Republicans suppress black votes, Alito wrote, “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

The ruling largely eliminates majority-minority districts, which Democrats favor because blacks vote so heavily Democrat — not because segregating blacks into their own, separate but equal districts actually remedies any sort of discrimination. It’s also racist nonsense that only a black person can represent blacks fairly.

There are exceptions, the Court said, and under Callais, courts must apply strict scrutiny to any racial gerrymandering. For example, 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.”

Callais arose after Democrats sued Republicans over a post-2020 congressional map in Louisiana that had only one majority-minority district. The more racially segregated aftermath included a 250-mile-long district across much of the state to produce a second majority-minority district. The additional seat obviously benefited Democrats. As the New York Post reports, “The Trump administration and state officials challenged the new map, arguing it was a racial gerrymander in violation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law.”

Six justices agreed.

As Justice Clarence Thomas asserted in his concurring opinion, “I would go further and hold that §2 of the Voting Rights Act does not regulate districting at all.” That’s the opinion held by many conservatives, too.

In her dissent, which she read from the bench, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the Court did go that far. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” she huffed. “In the States where that law continues to matter — the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting — minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

She laid out a hypothetical scenario of supposed voter disenfranchisement of blacks by carving up their circular district into six pie pieces, but her fictional situation sounds most like what Democrats just tried to do in Virginia.

Kagan hyperbolically concluded, “I dissent … from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

In practical terms, Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry is planning to suspend primaries to allow for a new map to be drawn. In other states, it may not work out this way in time for the 2026 midterms, but some estimates suggest Republicans might redistrict in ways that could yield as many as 19 more GOP House seats. Obviously, that would overwhelm anything Gavin Newsom or Abigail Spanberger can concoct.

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