On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision on a Louisiana racial gerrymandering case that much of the country has been waiting on for more than a year. And the decision it handed down couldn’t have been a surprise to anyone following the current Court’s decisions of late.
The case? Louisiana v. Callais, which carries with it an interesting story with a familiar lesson: pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Ever since a successful federal lawsuit in the 1990s, when Louisiana had eight congressional districts, the state has had just one majority-black district in its congressional map. That number went from 7-1 to 6-1 to 5-1 as Louisiana’s population stagnated from the 1990s to the 2000s through the 2010s. But after the 2020 census, when the state’s population rang in at just about one-third black and the state legislature passed a 5-1 congressional map (that being five white Republicans and one black Democrat; it’s exceptionally rare and becoming rarer that a white Democrat can get elected to just about anything not just in Louisiana but anywhere in the Deep South), the NAACP and a collection of like-minded partisan Democrats ran into court alleging that a 5-1 map in a state with a population that is one-third black is a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Section 2 is the part of that law which essentially establishes affirmative action for black Democrat politicians. As interpreted going back decades, it established the idea that racial minorities should be made into majorities where possible within things like congressional districts so that members of those minority groups could win elections.
This has not produced particularly outstanding results.
And by that I mean the results it has produced have names. Like Hank Johnson, Sheila Jackson Lee, Frederica Wilson, Bennie Thompson, Maxine Waters, Dollar Bill Jefferson, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Al Green, Cori Bush, and lots of others. The Congressional Black Caucus has been the repository of crooks, dopes, communists, and reprobates on a scale unmatched by any other, for the express reason that the districts producing the Star Wars cantina-scene cast of characters that make up that caucus are protected.
Most people are not fans of this plan. Most people aren’t fans of gerrymandering, period, and racial gerrymandering is the most odious kind.
And yet, racial gerrymandering was the expressed demand of the NAACP in their lawsuit after Louisiana drew its 5-1 map in 2022. They found an Obama-appointed federal judge in the Middle District of Louisiana named Shelley Dick and brought their case to her, hitting paydirt as they did so. Dick, drawing on a Supreme Court case in Alabama that held that a 6-1 map drawn by that state’s legislature (with a black population of about 28 percent, much of it centered in Birmingham and in a corridor between Montgomery and Mobile) was too aggressive to pass muster, ruled Louisiana’s 5-1 map violated Section 2.
And the Fifth Circuit, not recognizing the differences between the demographics of Louisiana and Alabama, didn’t overturn Dick’s ruling. Under pressure from the courts, Louisiana’s legislature, in a special session in early 2024, passed a 4-2 map that contains an utterly absurd 6th District — it snakes from Baton Rouge, in the southeastern part of the state, to Shreveport in the northwest. Cleo Fields, who ironically was the congressman from the old Eighth District that was a racially gerrymandered Rorschach test of a district the courts threw out in the 1990s, got himself elected in the newly black 6th District.
Then along came Bert Callais and several of his friends, who sued the state in the Western District of Louisiana claiming their 14th Amendment Equal Protection rights were being violated by a racially-gerrymandered district map. Callais won at the district court level; the case had bubbled up ever since.
Last year it was heard at the Supreme Court. But it wasn’t decided — Callais was originally argued on 14th Amendment grounds and not on the question of whether Section 2 needed to be thrown out. That question was called back for a rehearing last fall, and then the Court, somewhat suspiciously, sat on the case until Wednesday.
Rumor has it that Elena Kagan delayed writing her dissent for several months in order to cause a Purcell problem for Louisiana and other Southern states who would redistrict their congressional maps if unfettered by the old interpretation of Section 2. Purcell being a Supreme Court doctrine that court cases decided too close to elections can’t be allowed to interfere with those elections — the effect of which, in this case, being that while Fields’ gerrymandered district is going away, conventional wisdom suggests he could end up with two more years in Congress because candidates have already qualified and the primary elections are already well underway using the current illegal map. By 2028, the Louisiana legislature will have passed a new 5-1 map, if not a 6-0 map, and Fields will go back to his day job as a “lawyer.”
Kagan, according to Mollie Hemingway’s new book about Samuel Alito, has pulled this sort of stunt before. She pulled it after someone — we don’t know who, though we can guess — had leaked the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs case, which put the conservative justices in physical danger from the crazies among the pro-abortion crowd, and Kagan held her dissent in that case even after being asked to hurry up.
Elena Kagan is a nasty piece of work, so you’ll know. Perhaps too smart by half. Wednesday afternoon, word had it in Louisiana that lawyers for the plaintiffs were going to seek an injunction against the map, forcing a judicial resolution of the issue, based on the Supreme Court calling it illegal. Should that effort include references to Kagan’s deliberate bad-faith dilatory tactics, there might not be enough popcorn in America to satisfy the spike in demand.
I haven’t seen polling on Callais, but it’s my guess that most Americans are fine with the reasoning of the Court’s 6-3 majority that drawing districts solely on racial lines, especially when those districts look like a “snake,” as Chief Justice John Roberts called Fields’ LA-6, is an illegitimate way to do business.
But the Court has long held that pure, naked politics isn’t illegitimate in mapmaking of this sort. And that’s a good thing for Democrats in states like Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and California, where they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to disenfranchise their Republican voters.
Now it’s a good thing for states like Texas and Florida, which are moving to create very, very advantageous maps reflecting the political power of the GOP majority at both the ballot box and in the state legislature. Other Southern states will almost certainly follow suit by 2028, Louisiana being one of them.
And the Democrats are absolutely melting down over this development.
For example, here’s Angie Nixon, a Florida state representative very unhappy about that state’s House of Representatives holding a lopsided vote in favor of a new congressional map that will flip four Democrat seats to the GOP this fall:
Here’s Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, whose state has gerrymandered its congressional districts to such an extent (14 Democratic districts and three Republican districts in a state where Republicans are more than 40 percent of the vote) that to do any more along those lines will probably backfire, nevertheless promising to do just that:
Here’s Sad Barack Obama, who neglects to inform his audience that his own Justice Department had no objection to Louisiana’s old 5-1 congressional map, which is likely going to be restored:
And here’s Hakeem Temu Obama Maximum Warfare Jeffries, who just a week ago was crowing melodiously, his hands contorting into hieroglyphics, over the passage of Virginia’s heavily gerrymandered 10-1 congressional map, screeching about the curtain of racism descending over America thanks to the Callais case:
Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered. And both of them squeal so loudly it’ll split your eardrums.
Democrats have been gerrymandering blue-state congressional maps without shame for decades. The protection from Republicans following suit was the old interpretation of Section 2, regardless of how intellectually indefensible it was in a country where it isn’t even remotely remarkable for black politicians to win over white electorates (Byron Donalds, Tim Scott, Wes Moore, Deval Patrick, Ilhan Omar, Daniel Cameron, Mark Robinson, Burgess Owens, Mia Love, countless others). That’s now gone.
The meltdown isn’t over racism. It’s over the fact that the political wallabies of the Congressional Black Caucus will become something of an endangered species and the Republicans will play by the same rules the Democrats do.
And the level of sympathy one should have for the Democrats caterwauling and swearing to fight (which, inevitably, means more assassination-porn rhetoric for the indefinite future) should be … zero.
Go and cry a little.
https://spectator.org/the-left-is-melting-down-over-callais/
