The Supreme Court’s Callais Ruling Has Already Wrought Terrible Damage

Jurisprudence Getty Images Plus Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story each week about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back. You’ll also receive updates on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. Willie Dixon and Mary Gatson were sitting in the fellowship hall of a Baptist church in Lowndes County, Alabama, this week, waiting for a congressional town hall and trying to determine which voting district they now live in. Dixon thought she knew. She did not. “Create enough chaos,” she told a reporter, “and people will give up and go home.” She was describing what has happened after Alabama rewrote its congressional map in the middle of an active election, thanks to the Supreme Court. This week, voters in four of Alabama’s seven congressional districts cast ballots in a second primary after the state voided congressional-primary votes already cast in May, including mail ballots, and ordered voters back to the polls under new district lines. The do-over will cost Alabama taxpayers an estimated $4.4 million. It is also a live demonstration of Dixon’s argument: When the rules change midstream, confusion does not merely accompany the process. It changes who participates. In April, SCOTUS decided Louisiana v. Callais, sharply narrowing the Voting Rights Act’s capacity to protect minority voters from discriminatory maps and making Section 2 vote-dilution claims far harder to prove. Alabama’s Legislature did not wait to see how far that door would open. Less than two weeks before its May primary, with mail voting already underway, lawmakers redrew four of the state’s seven congressional districts and revived a map federal courts had already found intentionally discriminatory toward Black voters. Lowndes County is not a random place for this to be happening. It sits along the Selma-to-Montgomery route, the ground the 1965 voting rights march crossed on its way to the Capitol. The Voting Rights Act exists because of brutal violence, known as Bloody Sunday, that happened on that road. Sixty-one years after the VRA was signed, the county the march passed through is now the site of a live experiment in how much of that law’s actual protection survives Callais. What makes this episode unusually clarifying is that nobody on the winning side seems to feel much need to disguise the motive. Rep. Shomari Figures’ district lost Mobile, his hometown, reducing its Black population from about 47 percent to roughly 40 percent. Asked about the district’s new lines, Barbour County Commission President Jerry McGilvray offered this, unprompted: “We don’t have anything in common with Mobile, Alabama. Whoever would have thought? I don’t want to hear about shrimp boats and deep-sea fishing.” The Trump-endorsed front-runner for the seat put it more bluntly still: “The fact that the Republicans have an ability to regain the seat is great. I love it.” He added, accurately, that control of Congress could be riding on it. That is the argument, delivered in full sentences, on the record, to a reporter, by the people it benefits. It is also, more formally, the state’s own legal position. When Alabama’s new map reached the Supreme Court, the state’s lawyers argued that it was partisan, not racially discriminatory—in short, that Republican legislators had drawn it simply to elect more Republicans. The court’s conservative majority declined to block the new map, accepting the state’s contention that partisan rather than racial considerations explained its design. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, wrote that the ruling “debases the democratic process” and “corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship.” None of this is happening quietly. President Donald Trump himself urged more states to join in, saying openly that his party could gain 20 House seats in a wave of redistricting. That distinction, partisan rather than racial, is the entire legal ballgame, and it is worth asking whether it describes anything real on the ground in Alabama specifically. In the litigation that first forced the state to draw a second district where Black voters had a genuine opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, a federal court found, and Alabama’s own expert witness conceded, that Black voters in the state supported their preferred candidates with roughly 92 to 93 percent of their vote, while white voters supported opposing candidates with about 85 to 95 percent of theirs. That is not mild polarization; it is closer to total separation. In a state where voting behaves that way, sorting voters by party and sorting voters by race can become functionally inseparable in practice, even if the law treats them as distinct categories. Partisan gerrymandering claims are effectively unreviewable in federal court under the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause. Racial gerrymandering claims, at least on paper, still are. That gap creates a powerful incentive to describe mapmaking as partisan advantage in states where race and party overlap most completely, since it lets a legislature reach a racially disparate outcome without ever having to defend a racial argument in court. In Alabama, sorting by party accomplishes most of that already. Alabama is not improvising alone. In Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry suspended an active congressional primary after roughly 45,000 ballots had already been cast, declaring an “election emergency” so lawmakers could redraw the state’s map after Callais. Courts declined to stop the suspension. Asked on 60 Minutes what would happen to the votes already cast, Landry didn’t dress it up: Those ballots would simply be discarded, he said, and voters would try again. Told that this sounded like a significant thing to wave off, he replied, “It’s not my fault.” The details in Louisiana differ from Alabama’s, but the governing logic is identical—change the map after voting has begun, then ask voters and election officials to absorb the consequences, without much concern for how that sounds out loud. None of this requires imagining a secret plan passed between statehouses. It requires only noticing that Callais handed multiple states the same tool at nearly the same moment, and that the tool works precisely because confusion is not an unfortunate side effect of redrawing a map two weeks before an election. It is the mechanism. A Republican candidate in Alabama’s newly competitive district said as much himself, worrying aloud that the back-to-back primaries would suppress turnout because voters would assume they had already voted. He was not offering a warning about an abstract possibility. Like Dixon, he was describing the predictable consequence of forcing voters back to the polls after they believed that the election was over. This is not a new playbook. The old version relied on poll taxes and literacy tests, formally neutral tools designed to do racially exclusionary work. This version doesn’t bother with the disguise. It doesn’t need to. Once the Supreme Court has made it far harder to challenge discriminatory maps under the VRA, the political actors who benefit from redrawing them may feel less pressure to conceal what they are doing. Rep. Terri Sewell, one of two Black Democrats in Alabama’s delegation, put the distinction plainly: “This is not about no representation or some representation. It’s about fair representation.” Whether Alabama’s four rerun districts deliver anything resembling that this week may matter less, in the long run, than that the state didn’t feel any particular need to pretend otherwise while weakening it. 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