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Some of the changes now getting discussed could come this summer. Others are already being planned for next year. And unlike the first round of congressional remapping that President Donald Trump launched last year, this time there are few voices urging caution in either party.
“All states that have unconstitutional maps should look at that very carefully,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Thursday. “And I think they should do it before the midterms.”
In Johnson’s own Louisiana, which led the effort to curtail race-based redistricting, Republicans moved immediately to eliminate the Democratic House seat that the high court deemed unconstitutional on its Wednesday Louisiana v. Callais decision. In Tennessee, both leading GOP candidates for governor urged the state legislature to eliminate a majority-Black district in Memphis.
Neither southern state has had an all-Republican congressional delegation since the Reconstruction era, after the Civil War, but its GOP lawmakers saw one within reach.
“Come back in, get into special session, and get in there and redistrict,” Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the frontrunner for governor, said on Fox News. “This is how we’re going to make certain we can cement President Trump’s majority in the House.”
Democrats, whose seats in Republican-led southern states had been protected by the VRA, were mournful about the 6-3 ruling. But many also urged blue states to take advantage of it by drawing maps that would eliminate as many Republican seats as possible — even if that meant some Black Democrats would run in more competitive districts.
In some states, those changes would mean undoing race-conscious or anti-gerrymanding laws that Democrats had supported. Illinois Democrats, hours after the court’s decision, sidelined an amendment that would have required the state to consider race in redistricting.
That effort, which had passed in the state Assembly, lost its momentum when Democrats realized they’d be asking voters to limit gerrymanders that could benefit their party by expanding their current 14-3 advantage in the state’s House delegation. Democrats’ aggressive new maps in California and Virginia, designed to create 48-4 and 10-1 advantages, are emerging as models.
“I’d take 52 seats from California and 17 seats from Illinois,” said Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell, when the Congressional Black Caucus gathered to react to the decision. “At the end of the day, they’re rigging this election to try to win, and we just can’t sit back here and do nothing.”
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