Republican legislatures are using the Supreme Court’s redistricting ruling as permission to rig elections

The history of racism in America can be traced through Supreme Court dockets. Not just in the landmark cases through which the courts intervened to stem it — like Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled against school segregation; Loving v. Virginia, where the court overturned bans on interracial marriage; and Gomillion v. Lightfoot, which determined that districts drawn to disenfranchise Black Americans were unconstitutional — but in the instances where they got it historically, catastrophically wrong. 

Last week’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais will likely go down in history as one of the court’s most regressive rulings, one that threatens to erase decades of progress made by the civil rights movement. In a 6-3 majority, the court’s conservatives ruled that a congressional map drawn by Louisiana, which included two majority Black districts to reflect the state’s most recent census, constituted an act of racial gerrymandering against the white residents of the state. The court further argued that in order to invoke Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, petitioners had to prove that instances of discriminatory districting were designed with the intent to racially discriminate, regardless of the ultimate effects.  

In its immediate wake, Republican-controlled state legislatures have jumped at the opportunity to deal death blows to majority-minority, Democratic districts — working under the protection of a new Supreme Court decision that protects them from accusations of racial discrimination. 

In the South, states are moving to finalize sometimes decades-long efforts to write Black congressional representation out of state maps, and solidify virtually unilateral Republican control. NPR estimates that at least 15 House members of the Congressional Black Caucus are at risk of losing their seats in the mass Southern redistricting effort that has been set in motion following last week’s ruling. 

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With the ruling in hand, Louisiana has already been granted an expedited review by the Supreme Court for its new maps, despite the fact that early voting is set to begin in the coming days. Tennessee lawmakers entered a special session to attempt to rig a new map before the November midterms, a move that will certainly draw legal challenges. Alabama has submitted an emergency appeal for the Supreme Court to review its own maps weeks before its primaries. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis approved a new map that seeks to add four Republican seats to their House delegation (and has already been challenged in court). In Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp stated that while it was too late to mess with the midterms, the state would be compelled to make changes to its map in time for the 2028 presidential election. 

Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.), the congressman whose district is at the heart of Louisiana v. Callais, put it bluntly in a press conference following the ruling. “If you tell me that I have to jump a certain height, I could probably do that. Tell me I have to run a certain distance, I could probably do that, too. But if you tell me I have to be white to serve in Congress from Louisiana, I can’t do nothing about that.”

The very existence of Fields’ district was overruled by the court, and now the state’s elections have been thrown into chaos as Republican Governor Jeff Landry tries to force through a new map days before residents cast their ballots..

“People just want to know: will their vote count,” Fields tells Rolling Stone. “There’s a lot of confusion around this election. I think election integrity, not only in Louisiana, but across the country, has been damaged.” 

“The Supreme Court just got it wrong,” Fields says, “but they got it wrong in Plessy v. Ferguson, when they legalized segregation. I mean, southern states like Louisiana, Mississippi, in particular Alabama, those southern states still need protections from the federal government to be able to equally participate in the voting process. That’s why they passed the Voting Rights Act, and the Supreme Court has basically taken the position that we’ve overcome all of that.” 

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The rush by states like Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama to capitalize on the Supreme Court ruling is not the first gerrymandering push from Republicans since Trump retook office. The president himself asked Republican states to conduct a string of off-cycle redistrictings in an attempt to tip the balance of the November midterms towards the GOP. The play largely backfired, with Democratic states responding in kind with their own push to crack Republican districts out of existence. Illinois lawmakers are weighing whether to enter the redistricting flurry in order to deny Republicans the advantage. But fundamentally the party in power redrawing congressional districts to keep themselves in power is fundamentally an anti-democratic process, and Fields and his colleagues are worried about pushing the system past the point of no return. 

“What we have to be cautious of is not to have this race to the bottom — and I think this whole tone has been set, quite frankly, by the president,” Fields adds. “He walks into office and he signs an executive order to do away with diversity, equity, and inclusion. … For Congress and then the Supreme Court to follow that notion, it doesn’t bode well for America, because our diversity is our strength.” 

Fields says he’s been in contact with fellow members of the Congressional Black Caucus about their situations, and what needs to be done. In Mississippi, the court’s decision triggered a special legislative session that could see the state — once an epicenter center of Jim Crow legislating — move to forcibly remove Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s sole Democrat and Black representative, from his seat. “We’re gonna have to get our act together, we’re gonna have to resist with every fiber in our body,” Thompson said recently on MSNOW. “We’re gonna have to take this system on at every election.”

Fields is in a similar situation to Thompson. “The [Mississippi] governor’s urging the legislature to go into session. Bennie has had his election. He’d won his primary. He was like me, I had won my primary,” Fields says. “I just think that’s fundamentally wrong. We’re telling voters they may have to go back to the polls and have another election, and the election that they just had doesn’t matter. There’s something about that that’s totally un-American.”

It’s not an exaggeration, some states and lawmakers are moving to outright stop or cancel elections that are already underway. According to an analysis by Democracy Docket, over 40,000 mail-in ballots have already been cast in the Louisiana elections Governor Landry is currently attempting to suspend. In Georgia, where early voting has already begun, Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) — who in 2020 supported Trump’s efforts to usurp the state’s election results — has called on the state to simply toss out existing ballots and rig themselves a redo favorable to Republicans. “We could potentially pick up two to three seats in the state of Georgia,” Carter said. “And that’s important because that could impact the national majority.” 

Representatives in the South were not caught off guard. They had had “tough times before,” Fields says, and expected more in the future. But the mentality that necessitated the Voting Rights Act has crept far beyond the states where civil rights abuses were plentiful. In the original version of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, states with a history of racial discrimination in elections were required to submit changes to election laws — including state electoral maps — to the federal government for review. The process was known as “preclearance,” and was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013. Now, even states outside of those required to submit to preclearance measures are emulating the discriminatory practice that necessitated the backstop in the first place. 

One such state is Tennessee. Within hours of the Supreme Court’s decision, Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn jumped on X to demand that the state legislature “reconvene to redistrict another Republican seat in Memphis.” What she meant was that the state legislature should convene to eliminate the only remaining Democratic district in the delegation, the one encompassing Memphis — a majority Black city. 

“We had four, five Democrats when I came [into the House],” Rep. Steve Cohen, the district’s representative — who is white and Jewish — recalls to Rolling Stone, describing several past rounds of redistricting in Tennessee that had virtually eliminated the Democratic faction of the delegation. “So saying that Memphis should be redistricted, which means cutting up the Black vote, is very appealing to the MAGA base.” 

“They were just so quick to jump on it. They didn’t think about it,” Cohen adds. “They just said, ‘Here’s an opportunity to do something, and they looked at a district that’s majority Black and thought, ‘Oh, that must be something we attack.’” Cohen adds that the filing and withdrawal deadline for candidates had come and gone months ago. “The public understood that, that those were going to be the choices, and that to change that is disruptive to the whole political process.” 

Cohen and Fields agree that while fighting fire with fire in Democratic states is an appealing — and to a certain extent necessary — step in the short term, it’s unlikely to solve the actual rot at the core of the redistricting process. For about 15 years, Cohen has been introducing legislation — originally authored by his predecessor, Rep. John Tanner — that would “require that each state have an independent, bipartisan commission to draw the districts.” 

Cohen also points out that there isn’t anything in the Constitution mandating that the Supreme Court be capped at nine justices, and suggests a term-limited system where each of the circuit courts would have a justice on the Supreme Court.  Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion is [about] Section Two,” he adds. “Memphis is not a [preclearance] voting rights district, it never has been, never. So it makes no sense that the [court’s] opinion that Section Two has to be narrowed would affect this district at all.” 

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Fields says that Congress needs to pass a new John Lewis Voting Rights Act that leaves “nothing” for the Supreme Court to second guess. “I think also there should be some debate or some discussion about whether we put term limits on the Supreme Court,” he adds. Fundamentally though, Fields insists that both vulnerable lawmakers and Democrats in safe districts need to encourage voters to continue participating in the electoral system, even if their lawmakers are trying to rig it against them. 

“We cannot let that discourage us about voting, because if we do that, what does that say to John Lewis? Who had his brains literally beaten on the Edmunds Pettus Bridge. What does it say to Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King? All these great civil rights leaders, both Black and white, what does it say to them if we give up now?” Fields asks. “We’ve just got to continue to fight.”