What Is the Uproar About the Latest Supreme Court Ruling on Gerrymandering?
If you want the broader context on whether the Supreme Court is really partisan and what is actually happening in the courts, I wrote about that separately: Is the Supreme Court Really Partisan and Unethical?
When Rulings Conflict
When two Supreme Court rulings point in different directions, the later one generally controls. The Court is not bound by its own prior decisions — that’s what overturning precedent means.
The first ruling: Shaw v. Reno in 1993 established that racial gerrymandering violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Race cannot be the predominant factor in drawing district lines.
The second ruling: Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, decided 5-4, said partisan gerrymandering is beyond the reach of federal courts entirely. The Court didn’t say partisan gerrymandering is good or constitutional — it said federal courts won’t referee it. Drawing lines to favor your party is unchallengeable in federal court. Congress or state courts can still act. They haven’t.
So the second ruling takes precedence because it came later.
What Actually Happened
On April 29, Louisiana v. Callais came down from the Supreme Court 6-3. Louisiana has 6 congressional districts. The state is roughly one-third Black. The map had two majority-Black districts — the fight was over whether a state that is one-third Black is entitled to two of its six seats being majority-Black.
Justice Alito’s majority opinion said: the Voting Rights Act cannot be used to force states to draw race-based districts when the real driver is partisan advantage. If the map exists to guarantee Democratic seats rather than protect minority voters from discrimination, the constitutional justification collapses.
In other words: If you want to ban partisan gerrymandering, ban it directly. Don’t launder it through the VRA.
The press treated this as an outrage. Civil rights leaders called it devastating. The Congressional Black Caucus demanded passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
To me it defies common sense to think that the Republican party cares about anything but being more likely for their party to win elections. Wouldn’t that be gerrymandering for party advantage?
By the way, Congress could pass a law making partisan gerrymandering illegal. The Supreme Court itself noted in Rucho that Congress has that power. After the ruling came down in June 2019, Democrats won back the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2020. They held that majority for two years. They never passed that law, nor did they propose it. Considering the number of pure grandstanding bills they put forward, it is clear they did not even want this.
Maybe because they want to be able to gerrymander against Republicans when it helps them. Ya think?
If they had passed that law, the VRA would win this case.
Look at Illinois. Democrats hold roughly a 55-45% majority statewide. After the 2020 redistricting they drew a map that produced 14 Democratic congressional seats out of 17. Republicans won about 40% of the statewide vote and got roughly 18% of the seats. That map was challenged in court and survived — because under Rucho, partisan gerrymandering is untouchable federally.
The same party loudly demanding minority representation in Louisiana drew a map in their own state that made Republican voters functionally irrelevant.
Nobody in the prestige press called that a civil rights crisis.
The Gingles Framework
Critics will say the piece ignores the legal structure courts actually use. Fair enough. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) the Supreme Court established the test for when Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act requires a majority-minority district. Plaintiffs have to prove three things.
First: the minority group is large and geographically compact enough to form a majority in a single district.
Second: the minority group votes cohesively — meaning they tend to vote as a bloc for the same candidates.
Third: the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.
Prove all three and courts can order a majority-minority district.
Here is the irony. The second factor — minority voters vote cohesively — is precisely what creates the race and party overlap problem. The Gingles framework requires you to prove that Black voters vote together as a bloc. They do. For Democrats, at roughly 85-90%. So the test certifies the partisan correlation as a legal prerequisite. You cannot win a Gingles claim without proving the very fact that makes the resulting district indistinguishable from a partisan gerrymander.
The framework doesn’t resolve the contradiction. It bakes it in.
The ruling allowing partisan gerrymandering essentially causes the second part of the Gingles framework to be self-invalidating whenever it is applied.
Let’s Call This What It Is
The Democrats have been able to get automatic seats in Congress by applying the Voting Rights Act as a gerrymandering tool. That is what this is really about. Not civil rights. Not minority representation. Automatic seats.
It is naive to think either party prioritizes abstract minority representation over seats. That is not a partisan observation. That is just how power works.
Anyone who thinks the Democrats and the press are rallying around this for any other reason — I have a bridge to sell you.
The Cranky Old Guy has been watching this game long enough to recognize the players.