Louisiana v. Callais and the Long Run

The Louisiana v. Callais decision is one of the most consequential of recent years. Like many such decisions, the actual implications haven’t yet sunk in. To say that they are both broad and profound is to understate to the point of depreciation. It’s possible, even likely, that this decision will become one of those, like Dred Scott or Roe, that is so epoch-making that using the full name isn’t necessary.

Louisiana v. Callais essentially bans redistricting on racial grounds. For nearly sixty years, the prevailing interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was that, to ensure racial parity in election results, certain districts had to be set aside to represent minorities alone. In practice, this meant black-majority voting districts. I know of no case where a district was created for Hispanics, Asians, or anybody else.

This enabled the Democrats to resort to gerrymandering, a term that nearly everyone has forgotten was intended as a pejorative. Voting districts were created “on behalf of blacks” that were in fact rotten boroughs, controlled by Democrats in perpetuity. This is one of those things, like fake Somalian day-care centers, that nobody ever mentioned and that we were all supposed to ignore, even though it represented blatant racism that undercuts both the language and spirit of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

For decades, the federal government has enforced this practice, with particular attention given to the states of the old Confederacy as being naturally more apt to transgress. That has now ended. The decision makes the practice illegal nationwide. Consequences are en route as we speak.