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
2026 election
Case Before Supreme Court Could Destroy Voting Rights Act and Cement GOP Control of House 'For At Least a Generation'
If the court dismantles Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and allows overtly racist gerrymanders, one report estimates that Republicans will be virtually guaranteed an additional 19 seats in the 2026 midterms.
Oct 15, 2025
The US Supreme Court will rehear a case on Wednesday that could strike a death blow to the Voting Rights Act and, in the process, virtually guarantee that Republicans hang on to power in the 2026 midterm elections and well into the future.
At issue in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, is Section 2 of the VRA, which outlaws racially discriminatory redistricting. Max Flugrath, communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, wrote for Slate that "by taking the unusual step of reopening arguments, legal experts believe, the court's far-right majority may have telegraphed its intent to dismantle Section 2."
"If it falls, the impact will reverberate far beyond Louisiana, reshaping political power across the entire country," he said.
According to a report from Fair Fight and Black Voters Matter, if Section 2 is dismantled, it would guarantee Republicans an additional 19 safe seats in the US House of Representatives, and as many as 27 when combined with the GOP’s Trump-led push for mid-decade gerrymandering.
"It's enough to cement one-party control of the US House for at least a generation," according to the report.
The origins of the case itself are highly unusual. It began typically enough, with a conservative Fifth Circuit Court affirming a lower court's ruling that the congressional maps drawn by the state GOP in 2022 constituted an illegal racial gerrymander. Despite Black residents making up roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, many of them were crammed into a single district, while the other five in the state remained majority white.
After the court ruling, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry convened an emergency legislative session to draw new maps that complied with the court's order and granted another majority-Black district. But shortly after the map was finalized, it was challenged by a group of white voters, who alleged that by drawing new maps that gave Black voters fairer representation, Louisiana's legislature was effectively enacting an illegal racial gerrymander against voters who are not Black.
"Their logic twists the 14th and 15th Amendments—which were themselves created to protect voting rights—in an attempt to destroy them," Flugrath said. "The argument should have been laughed out of court. Instead, a lower court embraced it, and an appeal was accepted by the Supreme Court."
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the new case in March, but—in an extraordinarily rare move—chose not to issue a ruling. Instead, it punted the case to its next term in October, directing the parties involved to center their arguments on the question of whether the Fifth Circuit's requirement for the legislature to create a second majority-minority district violated the 14th or 15th Amendments.
Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Louisiana Illuminator that it was "an ominous question" for the court to pose because it would allow for states to carry out racially motivated redistricting while removing the legal framework to counter them.
The Supreme Court rejected similar claims of discrimination against white people in the 2022 Allen v. Milligan case out of Alabama, which the court decided 5-4 with conservative Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberals to uphold section 2.
However, Kavanaugh signaled that he may be willing to side with such arguments in different circumstances. He noted in his concurring opinion that he agreed with a point made by Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent that "even if Congress… could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under Section 2 for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future."
As Matt Ford wrote for the New Republic in July, "The temporal argument, as Kavanaugh phrased it, is telling":
In the mid-20th century, the federal government dismantled nearly all of the legal architecture of Jim Crow racial apartheid in the American South and elsewhere. Congress enacted powerful laws like the Voting Rights Act that created new tools to challenge specific laws and practices. The Supreme Court's liberal majority overturned past errors like Plessy v. Ferguson, which entrenched de jure racial segregation, and breathed new life into the Reconstruction-era amendments.
The Roberts Court is apparently unwilling to strike down those laws or overturn those rulings on the merits—that is to say, they have yet to rule that those civil rights efforts were unconstitutional in the 1950s or 1960s. Doing so would be tantamount to embracing Jim Crow again. Instead, they have argued that the laws and rulings are no longer permissible because they solved the problem, or at least have done so sufficiently to render them unnecessary.
Assuming all the other conservatives stay the course, Kavanaugh alone switching sides in the Callais case would be enough to functionally destroy Section 2.
If this does happen, Flugrath warned that "politicians who gerrymander to silence voters of color will have a new defense: Fixing racial discrimination is discrimination itself. It's an Orwellian logic that would make it nearly impossible to challenge unfair maps—not just in Congress but in state legislatures, city councils, and school boards across the country."
"The result would essentially be a return to the pre-1965 Jim Crow playbook, masked in pseudo-constitutional language," he continued. "If Section 2 falls, we could see an existential shift in power—a system in which representation reflects not the will of the people but the will of those in power. Congress would become insulated from accountability, its makeup preserved by maps drawn to protect incumbents."
With oral arguments beginning Wednesday, protesters assembled outside the Supreme Court, with signs bearing the image of the late civil rights icons John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer. Dr. Press Robinson, who has been part of the legal team arguing for fair maps in Louisiana since 2022, said this case is a battle to maintain the legal equality that those figures fought to secure.
"Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees that communities of color have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. It is one of the last remaining tools we have to protect against racial discrimination in voting and ensure that historically silenced voices are heard," Robinson said in an op-ed for the ACLU. "We need fair maps because they are the foundation of a representative democracy. Without them, entire communities are silenced because the game is rigged before it's even started."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Dems Say They'll Stand Firm Against Budget Deal Unless GOP Halts Attack on Healthcare
Health insurance premiums are expected to rise significantly for approximately 22 million Americans after Republicans ended a tax credit for those enrolled in programs under the Affordable Care Act.
Sep 11, 2025
Democratic leaders said Thursday that they plan to hold up negotiations on a potential government shutdown unless Republicans agree to forfeit a policy change that is expected to dramatically raise health insurance premiums for millions of Americans.
Health insurance premiums are expected to rise significantly for approximately 22 million Americans enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace plans after Republicans refused to extend enhanced tax credits when passing Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" in July.
In remarks on Capitol Hill Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he and Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) were in total agreement not to negotiate unless Republicans agree to extend the tax credits.
“On this issue, we’re totally united. The Republicans have to come to meet with us in a true bipartisan negotiation to satisfy the American people’s needs on healthcare, or they won't get our votes, plain and simple,” Schumer warned at a press conference.
"We will not support a partisan spending agreement that continues to rip away healthcare from the American people. Period. Full stop,” Jeffries said.
The enhanced tax credits, which were created in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan Act and later extended through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, are credited with reducing the insurance premiums of millions of people who purchase health insurance through government exchanges.
The tax credits have reduced insurance premiums by 44% on average—over $700 per enrollee—and have contributed to the number of people purchasing insurance on the exchanges more than doubling to over 24 million in 2025.
According to a report released Wednesday by KFF:
Nine in 10 enrollees (92%) receive some amount of premium tax credit. If these enhanced tax credits expire at the end of 2025, out-of-pocket premiums would rise by over 75% on average for the vast majority of individuals and families buying coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplaces.
The increases come as insurance companies, citing "slumping share prices," per the Financial Times, are planning the largest hike to premiums in 15 years, including an 18% increase for those buying from ACA exchanges.
These increases will come on top of those already expected as a result of a Trump administration rule passed in June, which increased the maximum percentages of income and raw dollar amounts that insurance plans could charge patients out-of-pocket for care.
According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, these changes "will make coverage less affordable for millions of people." The CBPP estimates that "a family of four making $85,000 will have to pay an additional $197 in premiums for coverage in 2026" while a "family of two or more people on the same plan could face an additional $900 in medical bills if a family member is seriously ill or injured in 2026, and an individual enrolled in self-only coverage could face an additional $450 in medical bills."
In all, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in May that as a result of these mounting costs, over 5 million people will no longer be able to afford their health insurance plans.
"The death star of American healthcare, the insurance companies are preparing to blow up the lives of millions of middle-class families," warned journalist David Sirota in a podcast for The Lever.
Republicans in Congress are facing mounting pressure to extend the tax credits and stave off the premium hikes. Last week, 11 Republicans in Congress signed onto a bill that would extend the credits through 2026, allowing them to avoid the issue until after the midterm elections.
A survey conducted in July by two of Trump's most trusted pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward, found that for Republicans in the most competitive districts, "a 3-point deficit becomes a 15-point deficit" against the generic Democrat if they allow the healthcare premium tax credit to expire.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has stayed coy about whether he and the Republican caucus plan to support extending the credits.
"I'm not going to forecast that right now," Johnson told reporters earlier this week, while also saying, "There's a lot of opposition to it as well."
Democrats, meanwhile, have proposed a competing bill to make the subsidies permanent and are hoping to use this month's budget showdown to force Republicans to make concessions on the issue.
As David Dayen wrote Monday for the American Prospect, it sets up a challenging strategic and moral dilemma for Democrats:
On the one hand, Democrats fighting for healthcare benefits speaks to an issue where they have the highest level of support from the public. They would credibly be able to tell voters that they fought for lower costs during an affordability crisis and won, and that more of that will happen if they are given power in the midterms.
On the other hand, Republicans willingly drove the healthcare system toward the point of oblivion, and some may question why Democrats would offer a lifeline to bail them out. In this reading, relieving Republicans of the consequences of their health care plans would be harmful to Democratic midterm chances; Trump would take credit for keeping health care costs low.
What's clear, Dayen said, is that "unless action is taken, it will be an enormous example of Trump's failure to rein in the runaway cost of living."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, urged Democrats to stand firm as the fight over a potential government shutdown heats up.
"If Republicans refuse to negotiate and move away from their cost-increasing agenda, then it is Republicans who will be forcing a government-wide shutdown," Gilbert said. "There should be no deal without assurances that the budget will be honored and not impounded, and one that returns care to the American people.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Dems Break GOP Supermajority in Iowa Statehouse with 20-Point Swing in Trump District
In a race that bodes well for Democrats' hopes in 2026, Catelin Drey won by championing "affordable housing, childcare, and healthcare, strong public schools, and bodily autonomy," wrote one progressive Iowa journalist.
Aug 27, 2025
Democrats have broken the GOP stranglehold over Iowa's statehouse with a resounding win in a special election for the state Senate on Tuesday.
In the Sioux City-area district that Donald Trump carried by more than 11 points in 2024 and which had been won by Republicans for 13 consecutive years, Democrat Catelin Drey is projected to have won a convincing 55% of the vote over her Republican opponent, Christopher Prosch.
By taking the vacant seat, Democrats not only added to the mounting evidence for a coming anti-Trump backlash in the midterms, but also ended the Republican supermajority in Iowa's state Senate, which has allowed the GOP to spend the past three years curtailing abortion rights, stripping civil rights protections from transgender people, and chipping away at public education.
Additionally, the Democrats have thrown up a barrier to Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who needs a supermajority to confirm appointments and will now require some measure of bipartisan approval.
Like other successful Democratic candidates, Drey's message focused on affordability, with a special emphasis on the cost of living for families. Her slogan was "Iowa's Senate needs more moms."
"She has highlighted issues of particular importance to young parents," wrote Laura Belin for the progressive Iowa politics site Bleeding Heartland. "Affordable housing, childcare, and healthcare, strong public schools, and bodily autonomy."
Drey seized on outrage toward Republican attempts to defund public schools. Teachers, she said in one ad, "shouldn't have to rely on GoFundMes just to do their jobs."
"One takeaway from the Iowa special election: don't listen to centrist Democrats on education," said Jennifer Berkshire, an education writer for The Nation and the New Republic. "Catelin Drey made defending and funding public schools a focal point of her campaign and called for rolling back Iowa's controversial school voucher program."
Drey's victory adds to the already mounting pile of evidence that backlash towards President Donald Trump, whose approval ratings have skidded to near-record lows in recent weeks, will manifest at the ballot box next November.
G. Elliott Morris, a political data journalist, wrote Wednesday in his Strength in Numbers newsletter that "there have been plenty of special elections" this year, with "all of them suggesting a pretty sizable leftward shift in the electoral environment since November 2024."
Citing data from The Downballot's special election tracker, Morris wrote:
On average in 2025, Democratic candidates in special elections are running about 16 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris’s margin versus Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election. That is 5-6 points higher than the average Democratic overperformance in 2017.
These crushing results, Democratic strategists say, are the reason behind Republicans' frantic efforts to ratchet up gerrymandering in states like Texas, where they control the state legislature.
"If you're wondering why Republicans are gerrymandering the fuck out of red states," said Democratic fundraiser Mike Nellis, "Democrats just flipped a Trump [+11] Iowa Senate seat. That's what they're afraid of."
With Drey's victory, Iowa Democrats have now won four consecutive special elections held in the state, flipping two other Republican-held seats. Riding that wave of optimism, they now have their sights set on a greater target: Iowa's two-term senator Joni Ernst, who comes up for reelection in 2026.
Defeating Ernst would be a significant boost to Democrats' efforts to regain control of the Senate in 2026. That effort may have been helped along by Ernst herself, who responded to questions at a town hall earlier this year about her support for savage cuts to healthcare in the GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill Act by callously remarking, "Well, we are all going to die."
An internal poll published Tuesday showed Democratic state senator Zach Wahls, one of many Democrats vying for the party's nomination, edging Ernst out in a hypothetical general election. Other polls show the race to be within the margin of error.
In a video posted to X, Wahls said Tuesday's Democratic victory is further evidence that "the state is in play," after not having elected a Democratic senator since 2008.
"Iowans are sick of the inability of the current administration and politicians like Joni Ernst to deal with rising costs. They are sick of the corruption, and they are ready for change," Wahls said. "We are going to flip this US Senate seat, the exact same way that Catelin Drey flipped her state Senate seat."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular