The immediate consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais is that Republican-led states in the South can destroy their majority-minority districts and, in turn, deprive their Black residents of federal representation by politicians of their choosing.
Within days of the ruling, in fact, lawmakers in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama rushed to do just that, practically gloating over the opportunity to purge Democrats — most of them Black — from their congressional delegations.
“For too long, Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee wrote on X last week. “The General Assembly’s constitutional redrawing of Federal Districts affirms a foundational truth: Tennessee must be represented by Tennesseans, not socialist democrats.”
In a similar vein, Shad White, the Mississippi state auditor, also posted on X: “We’re fighting so that Bennie Thompson” — who represents the state’s 2nd District — “and Hakeem Jeffries are not in charge. We’re fighting for a country that is safe, where our taxes don’t go up, where our border is secure.”
To watch this whole spectacle is to put the lie to the idea — seen in the court’s opinion as well as among the court’s apologists — that the South has changed so much since 1965 that a strong Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in her dissent in the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder — in which Chief Justice John Roberts took his first swing at the law — to look at the fruits of federal protection and conclude that this protection is outmoded amounts to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
But this, again, is the immediate consequence of the court’s ignominious decision. The main consequence, however, might be to undermine American democracy altogether and push this nation’s politics to an even more dangerous place of high partisan tension and ideological Balkanization.
In Callais, Justice Samuel Alito framed partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate state interest — that state lawmakers had the right to shape their political communities as they saw fit. A state, he writes, may “target partisan distribution of voters, a specific margin of victory for certain incumbents, or any other goal not prohibited by the Constitution.” In his view, as well as that of the rest of the Republican majority on the court, there is no underlying principle of democracy or fair play in the Constitution that would compel a state legislature not to embrace the most egregiously partisan gerrymander imaginable.
As we’ve seen in the South post-Callais, Republicans have done that very thing, under the theory that representation is a gift the political majority bestows on the minority, not a fundamental right of democracy. On top of that, they seem to treat partisan identity as an immutable quality of the state, separate from the voters.
It is not, to look back to Representative Ogles’s comments, that Tennessee voters are represented in the House and many of them happen to be Republicans, but that Tennessee is Republican. The delegation must match the supposed general will of the state, even if large parts of the voting public back the other side.
Democrats may not believe the same of the states they lead, but they have followed suit regardless. To do otherwise would be to put themselves at the mercy of the Republican Party as it uses extreme partisan gerrymandering to give itself a durable structural advantage in the House of Representatives. As my news-side colleague Nate Cohn notes, Republicans could eventually give themselves a roughly 4-point advantage in the House, meaning that Democrats would need to win the national House popular vote by at least 4 points to win a bare majority in the chamber.
The effect of this arms race is a House that looks something like the Electoral College. If you can win control of a state capitol, no matter how narrow the victory or how slim the majority, then you can immediately redraw congressional and state legislative maps to lock your party in power. Republicans will lose representation in blue states, Democrats in red ones. It is true that, in theory, a Republican lawmaker could represent a majority-Democratic city just fine. In practice, not so much; rigid partisanship does not usually select for the kind of person who might try to represent the entire community.
A system in which political parties can rewrite the rules to keep themselves in power indefinitely — a system in which, barring a tsunami of opposition, they cannot lose — is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. But that is where the United States is headed, if it’s not already there, thanks in large part to John Roberts and his majority, which has enabled the worst tendencies of their co-partisans in the Republican Party. For his part, Roberts sees his work as fundamentally apolitical. “We’re not simply part of the political process, and there’s a reason for that, and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate,” Roberts said last week.
In this world, Congress is even less capable than it already is. Not only would we see fewer opportunities for the kind of cross-partisan and ideological cooperation that is the engine of the most practical work of the House and Senate, but specific communities will lose their voice in Congress. In a post-Callais world, who will stand up for Americans living in the Black Belt — named so for the soil, by the way — of Alabama or the Gulf Coast of states like Mississippi and Louisiana? What about the cities of Nashville and Memphis in Tennessee? Or on the other side of the partisan divide, the rural communities of New York and California or of Maryland and Virginia?
It is also important to consider the way this state of affairs might heighten the sense that red states and blue states are fundamentally different — separate countries, really — forced together in a crumbling marriage.
In 1820, Thomas Jefferson observed that “a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” He was writing about the Missouri Compromise and the mounting sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery. But it is not hard to see in our moment the outline of a firm and intractable partisan divide, the kind of line that breeds animosity and leaves the nation pregnant with the danger of disunion.
What is to be done? To those who hope to restore — or perhaps we should say bring — a measure of democracy to American politics, the first truth to realize is that you fight in the system you have, not the one you might want to have. This makes the Democratic Party the only plausible vehicle for serious reform, given the state of the Republican Party and the absence of a viable third-party movement.
And Democrats must do everything they can to win power, including retaliatory gerrymandering, so that they can actually build a more equitable political system and trim the authority of institutions, like the Supreme Court, that stand in the way of greater democratization.
Fighting in the system as it exists also means that, if they manage to win majorities in the House and, especially, the Senate, Democrats must abolish both the filibuster in the Senate and any other procedural obstacle to a more majoritarian Congress.
Ultimately, political reform will take the shape of a partisan project — a specific, party-driven gambit and not a broad bipartisan compromise. This could be passage of a stronger, revitalized Voting Rights Act along with a national ban on partisan gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting — in other words, some combination of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the stillborn For the People Act — or it could be something more radical, like expanding the size of the House (which has been capped at 435 members for nearly a century), legalizing electoral fusion or moving the country toward proportional representation.
Whatever Democrats do, they must do something. If the aim of our political system is fair and meaningful representation for all Americans, then we are far from the target and receding even further.
You could even, to paraphrase the words of an old socialist saying, argue that American society stands at a crossroads: either transition to democracy or regression into barbarism.
Which will we choose?
