The Democrats May Not Survive Callais Ruling
If the title of this column seems to exaggerate the potential impact of last week’s Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, it’s probably because most political pundits have focused on its effect below the Mason-Dixon Line. But the majority-minority congressional districts that will need to be altered pursuant to the Court’s ruling are far more pervasive than most realize. Ballotpedia, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey, estimates that these racially gerrymandered districts account for 148 seats in the House of Representatives. This is about one third of the House’s 435 districts and 122 of them are held by Democrats — more than half of their 212 seats.
Dhillon will be dealing with desperate people who know that a few more rulings like this … amount to a real threat to the Democrats and their laundered taxpayer money.
This is why House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went on an unhinged rant when SCOTUS handed down its ruling. The Democrats had long ago weaponized the Voting Rights Act (VRA) by funding pettifoggers like the Elias Law Group to convince federal courts that Section 2 of the VRA required racially gerrymandered districts wherever they could be contorted enough to make the demographic math work. Last week, the Court corrected that misinterpretation. As the opinion’s author, Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, patienly explained it on page 6: “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it.” In other words, this section of the VRA explicitly prohibits “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race.”
The effect of this ruling is that states which have gerrymandered district maps based on race will likely have to revisit and redraw those maps. The day after the Court rendered its decision the Justice Department confirmed that it will vigorously enforce the Court’s ruling on majority-minority districts in all 50 states. Just The News reported, “United States Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said Thursday that the Justice Department will enforce the Supreme Court’s decision on racially gerrymandering districts in every state that has such a district.” Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), wrote to the DOJ urging expeditious action on this:
The Department should not wait for private litigants to identify every race-based district one by one. The Civil Rights Division has participated in, monitored, or influenced redistricting litigation for years. It should therefore identify the universe of districts created, preserved, or defended under the old Section 2 regime and determine whether they survive Callais. The Department should act swiftly with urgency: issue guidance implementing Callais, review every pending and prior, yet still in effect, Section 2 redistricting matter, and use its authority to stop the VRA from continuing to be used as a pretext for continued unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
This will be no small undertaking. According to Ballotpedia, the 148 majority-minority districts are spread across no fewer than 28 states. And not all of them have been mandated by the courts pursuant to the VRA, though the “experts” are curiously vague concerning exactly how many have been gerrymandered as the result of lawsuits filed by Democrat-aligned law firms. It’s probable that some majority-minority districts are organic, particularly in the southwest, and it should be remembered that the Supreme Court ruled, in Rucho v. Common Cause, that strictly partisan redistricting is “non-justiciable” by federal courts. Yet it is a little suspicious that over half of the Democrats in the House represent majority-minority districts.
It is even more curious that Democrats represent every single majority-minority district where black voters constitute the majority. Stranger still is the voting pattern of districts dominated by Asians. Is it plausible that not one Republican represents a majority-minority district in which Asians make up the majority? In districts where Hispanics and Latinos make up the majority of voters, there are a few GOP representatives, but most of these districts are represented by Democrats. And then there are the districts in which “coalitions” of Black, Latino, and Asian voters are dumped into single legally protected majorities. If the Democrats are reduced to this kind of skulduggery they’re done. Can you hear the fear from the ACLU?
This decision is a profound betrayal of the legacy of the civil rights movement. By gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has weakened the primary legal tool that voters of color rely on to challenge discriminatory maps and election systems. In practical terms, this means that even where racial discrimination in voting is clear and ongoing, communities will be left without the most significant weapon they have to stop states from drawing districts that dilute their political power. Representation for Black, Latino, Native, and other voters of color will increasingly depend on the goodwill of legislatures rather than enforceable law.
This was the response to the Callais ruling from Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. Conspicuously absent from this Orwellian nonsense is any reference to the constitutional reasoning that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling. The ACLU, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, has long since abandoned its original mission. Nonetheless, they still command enormous resources, and this is what Harmeet Dhillon and the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department will be up against when they begin enforcing the Court’s ruling in Callais. Dhillon will be dealing with desperate people who know that a few more rulings like this … amount to a real threat to the Democrats and their laundered taxpayer money.
Chief Justice John Roberts has many faults, but he is the author of what may be the best answer to the kind of “thinking” that informs the Left’s viewpoint on Callais: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But the Democrats and their army of power hungry accomplices know that accepting such straightforward reasoning means they will join the Whigs in political oblivion.
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