SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
voting rights
The Supreme Court’s Whites-First Reasoning on Gerrymandering
Conservative justices’ excuses for eviscerating the Voting Rights Act embody an indefensible indifference to the rights of Black voters.
May 27, 2026
Will the Supreme Court’s evident desire to assist the GOP before the midterms override a decision by three Republican-appointed judges to spare Black-majority districts in Alabama from being gerrymandered out of existence?
This is the question posed by possible Supreme Court review of the finding by an Alabama judicial panel that Alabama could not use a congressional district map that deliberately discriminated against Black voters.
Two of the three judges on the panel, which found race-based discrimination, had been appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump; one, by President Ronald Reagan. The issue now is whether the conservative justices of the Supreme Court will upend the panel’s racial discrimination finding, notwithstanding that the Alabama judges had followed legal standards set in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais.
If they allow the Alabama decision stand, it will be a rare exception to the flood of Supreme Court-encouraged gerrymandering prompted by the Callais decision. Those Republican gerrymanders are likely to purge one-third of African-American representatives from Congress by destroying the Black-majority districts that elected them.
For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice.
Nonetheless, the six justices of the Supreme Court who caused this political bloodbath along racial lines claim that Republican gerrymandering does not violate the voting rights of African Americans. The purge is lawful under the Voting Rights Act, say the justices, because the GOP has partisan reasons to eliminate the Black districts that cannot be “disentangled” from racial motives.
Through a convoluted logic we explore below, and in the supposed interests of a “color-blind” Constitution, the right-winger justices have emasculated the Voting Rights Act. The majority insists we ignore the reality of race relations in America and ignore the link between Republican partisanship and Republican racial politics. But judicial ignorance cannot yield justice.
Partisanship and race have always been inextricably linked in Southern politics. Since party identification for white people in the South has, first and foremost, been driven by race, any “disentanglement” requirement makes it impossible for the Voting Rights Act to protect the voting rights of Black and other minority citizens.
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1870, recognized that the right to vote serves as the great protector of civil and human rights. The amendment prohibits states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race. But for nearly a century, the former Confederate states in effect suspended the 15th Amendment. Decade after decade, they prevented Black people from voting through legal chicanery, violence, and economic intimidation.
The long civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s against Jim Crow and for racial equality reached its culmination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act recalled the 15th Amendment to life by giving federal courts broad and flexible authority to protect African-American voting rights. Overwhelming majorities of both parties supported the act, with 80% of senators and 80% of congresspeople voting for it.
Among other protections, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits states from imposing any electoral “practice or procedure... in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” Notably, it does not require proving the racial intentions behind supposedly neutral voting requirements or election practices. The Voting Rights Act was passed precisely to protect the Black franchise even when those who oppose Black voting rights don’t say so out loud. Consequently Section 2 bars a practice if it “results in... abridgement” of voting rights.
In an effort to avoid any ambiguity, the act was amended in 1982 to specifically confirm that Section 2 is violated if a political processes gives racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate... to elect representatives of their choice.”
For decades federal courts applied this provision to protect African-American voters from racial gerrymandering. But in last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, the Supreme Court deleted those protections and turned the Voting Rights Act upside down. What was the supposed logic behind the decision?
Callais expanded on the court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which unleashed states to engage in unlimited gerrymandering. “Partisan” gerrymandering represents a majority party power grab. With gerrymandered districts, a slight majority of voters could elect a supermajority in a state legislature. Or, as President Trump hopes this year, multistate gerrymandering might give the GOP enough purloined congressional seats to retain their hold on Congress even if most voters, nationwide, vote against Republicans.
Gerrymandering defies the fundamental principles of America constitutional democracy; nonetheless the Rucho majority held that courts could not restrain the practice.
Bad enough. But in this anti-democracy decision, the conservative justices also found an excuse for gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Disempowering Democratic voters and disempowering African-American voters commonly go together, and the court’s right-wingers saw a danger: Disadvantaged voters might try to “evade” Rucho’s green-lighting of gerrymandering by “repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”
This stands reality on its head. The real danger is packaging (and therefore excusing) a racial gerrymander as a partisan one. Of the two “risks,” why did the right-wingers choose to privilege the one that de facto enhances white voting power, not the voting rights of citizens of color?
The “danger” in thwarting partisan gerrymandering is that a white majority won’t be allowed to unfairly magnify its power beyond its actual level of voter support. The danger in racial gerrymandering is that voters of color will, once again, be denied a meaningful voice in the political process because of race. In a multiracial democracy with a history of white racial oppression, it is obvious which concern should matter more. Except to white nationalists and their allies.
In order to put a state’s supposed “right” to gerrymander first, the conservative justices held that African-American voters who attack gerrymandering as racially discriminatory have a “‘special’ burden to overcome.”
“Courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim,” so an African-American plaintiff must “disentangle race from politics” and prove racial considerations drove a decision to eliminate Black majority districts.
“If either politics or race could explain a district’s contours, the plaintiff has not cleared its bar,” the Callais majority held, and the state is free to gerrymander away African-American congressional districts.
The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it.
The unexamined premise of disentanglement is that partisan advantage is a “race-neutral aim.” But how can partisan advantage be deemed “race neutral” when the very identity of the political party seeking advantage rests on racial ideology?
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.” So it is here.
Following the Civil War, white Southerners became the “Solid South” of the Democratic Party. The politics of the Democratic Party were grounded, before all else, on white supremacy. But in the 1960s, as the national Democratic Party became the party of civil rights, Southern support of Democrats eroded, then washed away.
White segregationist voters fled to the GOP, pushed by President John F. Kennedy’s and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights and pulled by Republican support for resistance to integration. The GOP’s Southern Strategy was employed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan’s presidential campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, notorious as the site of the murder of three civil rights workers, made unmistakable that Reagan was making a racial appeal to anti-integration white Southerners.
The racially motivated movement of white voters transformed the South from Democratic stronghold to Republican bastion. The GOP’s stance on race also found a sympathetic audience among whites outside the South, who often fought to preserve de facto segregation and white advantages.
In short, the Republican Party of the last 56 years was constructed on white resistance to integration and opposition to African-American rights. When, consequently, Republican politicians attack African-American political participation, the attacks advance GOP partisan interests by invoking voter-perceived racial concerns.
There can be no disentangling of race and politics when the means of attaining partisan advantage is racial politics—any more than you can “disentangle” cream from coffee after you’d poured it in. The mixture of race and politics is the Republican flavor.
By imposing a “disentanglement burden” on those seeking the protection of the Voting Rights Act, conservative justices made it impossible for the act to ever provide a remedy for the denial or abridgement of minority voting rights. What is true of redistricting applies to any other electoral practice that impairs minority voting effectiveness: Its discriminatory impact must always confer partisan advantage on a political party whose underlying ideological appeal is white resentment and white supremacy.
Consider what this means for people of color in our multinational, multiracial society.
Discrimination, past and present, in housing, zoning, employment, education, policing, and community resources, along with inequalities in wealth and income, have contributed to concentrating African Americans and of other people of color in America’s inner cities.
Although racial minorities are inevitably vulnerable in a larger society that disdains them, the existence of population centers in which minorities are the majority should at least mean that those non-white majorities can elect representatives to the tables of power. In the language of the Voting Rights Act itself, they are entitled to equal “opportunity... to elect representatives of their choice.” Redistricting that is simultaneously racial and partisan denies that right.
Tennessee’s post-Callais redistricting divided Memphis, a city with a 63% African-American majority, into three pieces, which were then distributed to three majority white districts. What could be more obvious than that this is precisely the kind of political practice Congress intended to outlaw in passing the Voting Rights Act? But the court’s “disentanglement burden” likely makes this legal atrocity untouchable.
For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice. The Republican Party’s entanglement of politics with race is no reason for the Supreme Court to deprive minorities of the opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it. Since their timely promotion of Republican political advantage cannot be disentangled from the GOP’s racial politics, we can fairly conclude that Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are intentionally advancing white supremacy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Citing 'Intentional Race-Based Discrimination,' Court Blocks Alabama's GOP-Rigged Electoral Map
“We reject in the strongest possible terms the state’s attempt to finish its intentional decision to dilute minority votes with a veneer of legislative regularity," said the panel of three judges—two of them Trump appointees.
May 26, 2026
A three-judge panel on Tuesday temporarily blocked Alabama from using a Republican-drawn congressional map created to effectively disenfranchise Black people, who make up more than one-quarter of the population of a state that, by GOP design, has just one majority-Black House district.
United States Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, a nominee of former President Bill Clinton, and District Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer—both of whom were nominated by President Donald Trump—granted a motion by Alabama state Sen. Bobby Singleton (D-24); Black voters, and groups including the national and state ACLU, the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, Legal Defense Fund, and Southern Poverty Law Center to block the state from using a racially rigged congressional map approved by the GOP-led Legislature in 2023.
The panel unanimously found that Alabama could not use the map because it “represents an intentional effort to crack the Black population in Alabama.”
“Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the judges wrote.
🧵 The Supreme Court's Callais ruling made it harder to prove in court that a legislative map dilutes minority voting strength.But a three-judge panel today confirmed that intentional racial gerrymanders can still be struck down by federal courts.Here’s what you need to know about Alabama 👇
[image or embed]
— Democracy Docket (@democracydocket.com) May 26, 2026 at 10:31 AM
“Cracking” is the splitting of communities of color to dilute their power in a given district. The related practice of "packing" refers to placing people of color in the same district in order to prevent them from having greater political power in surrounding districts.
The same three-judge panel had blocked a previous attempt by Alabama Republicans to implement a congressional map lacking a second Black opportunity district in defiance of a US Supreme Court ruling affirming a lower court's order to create such a district.
"We do not lightly intrude in state affairs, but our previous review of the undisputed evidence left us in no doubt that Alabama’s legislatively enacted plan (the “2023 Plan”) intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution," the three judges wrote in Tuesday's decision. "Our re-examination in light of Callais yields the same conclusion."
Last month, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines in Louisiana v. Callais that the Southern state's congressional map is “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander" because race—specifically, ensuring representation for Black voters—was the predominant factor in redistricting. The decision ironically voided the last remaining provision of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows voters of color to challenge racially discriminatory electoral maps in court.
Citing Callais, Alabama and other Southern states rushed to redraw their congressional maps to dilute Black voting power and satisfy requests from President Donald Trump for GOP-controlled state legislatures to rig districts for partisan gain ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Callais was followed by another 6-3 US Supreme Court ruling earlier this month, which found that Alabama could use the 2023 map, prompting liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor to dissent and point out that the high court previously found that “Alabama violated the 14th Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters.”
That ruling came two days after Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey had signed legislation authorizing new primary elections if federal courts agreed to rescind the creation of the second Black opportunity district. Ivey's signature came despite ongoing primaries in Alabama.
Black voters sought a temporary restraining order against the 2023 map, arguing that the 14th Amendment still banned redistricting that was deliberately discriminatory, regardless of Callais.
“Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found,” the three judges wrote Tuesday. “And it cannot use Callais to legitimize the series of specific and unusual decisions it made to entrench that dilution."
Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the state would immediately appeal the decision to the US Supreme Court.
“Know this—in my mind, it is not a matter of whether we win this case, only when," he asserted.
US Rep. Shomari Figures (D-Ala.), whose House seat would almost certainly be usurped by a Republican under the GOP-redrawn map, said in a social media post following Tuesday's ruling that "this is a significant step in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go before this fight is settled."
NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigation director Deuel Ross told The Associated Press that Tuesday's ruling “again vindicated the constitutional rights of voters in the Black Belt, and our clients look forward to voting under a fair map this fall.”
Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation—an advocacy group supporting fair maps—said in a statement, "Justice prevailed today; Alabama must use its 2023 court-adopted map—a map with two Black opportunity districts—in this year's elections."
"Make no mistake, the fight for justice is far from over in states across the country where politicians are enacting gerrymanders on top of gerrymanders to erase equal representation for communities of color," she continued. "The message from this panel is clear: Courts must fulfill their independent duty to protect voters’ rights, not just rubber-stamp state officials’ efforts to use the Supreme Court’s Callais decision as an excuse to draw Black voters out of a say in our democracy."
"Politicians aiming to enact new gerrymanders in South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere should take note," Jenkins added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Everything That's Wrong With the Democratic Establishment': Wasserman Schultz Slammed for Florida District Move
"She is no different than the Jim Crow Republicans that are eviscerating Black Representation across the South," said another District 20 candidate.
May 22, 2026
Less than three weeks after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a congressional map rigged for his fellow Republicans into law, Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz came under fire on Friday for switching districts.
First elected to Congress in 2004, Wasserman Schultz currently serves the 25th District, a target of Florida Republicans' recently redistricting—which is part of President Donald Trump's national push to retain control of the House of Representatives.
DeSantis split up the Democrat's District 25 "into five different districts in his newly approved maps, leaving her with complicated options as Black Democratic leaders and candidates fight to keep her out of at least one of those districts," the Miami Herald reported earlier this month.
Despite that opposition, Wasserman Schultz announced in a Friday video featuring various local figures that she is indeed running there—in District 20.
"I've fought for the people of Broward County my whole adult life, and you've always been able to count on me to deliver results for our community," she said. "And I've waged these battles when our values were on the line, all while still raising a family, beating cancer, and answering President Barack Obama's call to lead our national party."
Wasserman Schultz chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2011 until her 2016 resignation—after WikiLeaks published her emails showing bias in that year's presidential primary. She didn't acknowledge her scandalous departure from DNC leadership in the video, but she did speak in front of an Obama poster and an American flag.
"I'm announcing my candidacy for reelection in Congressional District 20, because we cannot let Trump destroy Broward County's power. And we know Republicans couldn't care less about lowering your healthcare, gas, or grocery bills," she continued. "But I'll use all my seniority and influence in Washington to continue to make our lives more affordable, and make Broward a safer, less expensive place to live, raise a family, and retire. This district deserves a representative who won't be learning on the job and has a proven record of results."
As the Herald detailed last week:
Only two of the five districts her voters were split into favor a Democratic candidate—and both of those districts were created in 1992 under the Voting Rights Act to ensure Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice.
Rep. Frederica Wilson's district, the 24th Congressional District, was drawn to pack an even larger Black majority into the district in the new maps. But DeSantis' office intentionally broke up Black neighborhoods in District 20 as a justification for redrawing surrounding districts in a way that favors Republicans.
Black candidates and party leaders in that district say a well-funded, white Democrat jumping into the race would work to further weaken Black political power.
Elijah Manley, one of the Black Democrats who was already running in District 20, criticized Wasserman Schultz's potential run to the newspaper earlier this month, and again on Friday, after she confirmed her decision, calling her "Jim Crow Debbie."
"Debbie Wasserman Schultz is carpetbagging to FL-20, a Black opportunity district, instead of running in her own," Manley said on social media. "DWS is everything that's wrong with the Democratic establishment. From insider trading to payday lenders."
"She is no different than the Jim Crow Republicans that are eviscerating Black Representation across the South," he added in a statement. "I look forward to retiring her from public office permanently."
As Politico reported Friday:
The district Wasserman Schultz is seeking to represent was previously held by Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who resigned from her seat in April following ethics and legal deliberations over allegations she denies that she stole federal emergency funds and routed them to her campaign.
Cherfilus-McCormick is running again. The seat was held by a Black lawmaker for more than 30 years—a fact often raised by existing CD-20 Democratic candidates, all of whom are Black, as Wasserman Schultz was weighing whether to run for the seat...
The other candidates in the race include Manley, Luther Campbell, a former 2 Live Crew member who won a landmark free-speech Supreme Court case, physician Rudolph Moise, and former Broward County Mayor Dale Holness. Several of the candidates have accused Wasserman Schultz of counting on the county’s African American and Caribbean American voters splitting their allegiances, drawing an advantage to her candidacy despite the 20th District having been historically drawn to help with Black representation.
The Florida Legislative Black Caucus said in a lengthy statement that Wasserman Schultz's "decision to pursue reelection in this historically Black district, despite explicit requests from the Black community to seek candidacy in a neighboring district, is disheartening," and stressed that "this is more than a political issue; it is a pressing voting rights and civil rights issue."
"The residents of District 20 deserve transparency, engagement, and genuine commitment to listening," the caucus continued. "Building trust with Black leaders and constituents should be paramount for anyone seeking to represent a majority-Black district. Unfortunately, the actions taken by Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz suggest a failure to prioritize these essential values, perpetuating a narrative of performative allyship rather than meaningful connection."
Wasserman Schultz also faced criticism for her move beyond Florida. Nina Turner, a former Democratic Ohio state senator and congressional candidate, declared: "Time to retire her. Where are you DNC? Her run illustrates her clear disregard and disrespect for the Black community, especially in this moment. This is just as bad as what the GOP is doing across the country."
Mason Pressler, a national committeeman for Young Democrats of Michigan, said that "as progressives field Black candidates for majority-Black seats (PA-03, MO-01, MI-13, etc.), establishment Democrats like DWS are showing their true colors when it comes to protecting black representation. They don't care, and voters must reject this at the primary ballot box."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular