by Clarice Feldman
The implications of the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais overturning race-based voting districts are far more profound and far-reaching than anyone has yet realized.
This week, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, ended decades of race-engineering in how congressional districts are drawn. The opinion is likely not only to benefit Republicans by increasing their representation in Congress, but it also should end racial engineering in a multitude of local institutions, to the benefit of all. It signals the beginning of the end for progressive governance, begun by President Woodrow Wilson (ironically, a segregationist), whose vision conflicts with the Constitution.
Thirty-one years ago, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that racial gerrymandering -- defended as a means for ensuring proportional electoral results according to race -- should not continue.
In my view, our current practice should not continue. Not for another Term, not until the next case, not for another day. The disastrous implications of the policies we have adopted under the Act are too grave; the dissembling in our approach to the [Voting Rights] Act too damaging to the credibility of the Federal Judiciary. The “inherent tension” -- indeed, I would call it an irreconcilable conflict -- between the standards we have adopted for evaluating vote dilution claims and the text of the Voting Rights Act would itself be sufficient in my view to warrant overruling the interpretation of § 2 set out in Gingles. When that obvious conflict is combined with the destructive effects our expansive reading of the Act has had in involving the Federal Judiciary in the project of dividing the Nation into racially segregated electoral districts, I can see no reasonable alternative to abandoning our current unfortunate understanding of the Act.
It did, however, continue until this week.
Progressivism at the Heart of Racial Engineering
Just last week, Thomas fleshed out why progressive governance is at odds with the Constitution, and for most of us who lived under its grip for decades, it’s important to understand that too many of us were manipulated into ignorance of its perniciousness. Once you listen to his speech, this week’s decision is easier to understand. It’s fundamental, not partisan.
The Constitution asserts that our rights are natural, inherent, God-given to each of us. This vision, said Thomas, strengthens us from concentrated power and mob rule.
Human history teaches us, alas, that numerical majorities frequently seek to control government, and use the state to violate the rights of the minority. Because man is fallen and the desire for power was, as James Madison described it, “sown in the nature of man,” government had to be limited. For, as Madison said, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But men are not angels. The slaveholders used the power of government to deny the fundamental natural rights of the slaves; the segregationists used the state to oppress the freed men and women -- including my ancestors.
President Wilson, he argues, took from Germany’s Otto von Bismarck a state-centric view and “liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God, but was to be enjoyed at the grace of government.” He began a process of undermining the Constitution and its setting of the relationships between citizens and their government.
This view, Thomas argues, led to Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao. Progressives in the U.S. embraced eugenics, “the inherent superiority and inferiority of race,” from which we got Wilson’s resegregation of the federal work force, and government sterilization programs.
Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive. As Calvin Coolidge said on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration:
“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”
Citizens of any race or ethnicity are endowed with equal rights and none get special privileges from the state.
Louisiana v. Callais
It’s a short step from all people are created equal to the notion that to end racial discrimination, we have to stop discriminating on the basis of race, the underlying sense of this week’s Louisiana v. Callais decision. (The case came to the Court through a complicated series of lower court cases of greater interest to constitutional scholars than I suspect, to you.)
In short summary, Louisiana racial grievance mongers believed the single already-very-tortured district created to assure a majority black district was insufficient and wanted a second majority black district created on the grounds that blacks made up about one-third of the state. The state complied with that court-compelled demand to create a second majority-black district. Others challenged it as a racial gerrymander, arguing that it was unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court had to resolve two questions: Whether under the Voting Rights Act (VRA) the Court should apply strict scrutiny only if race “predominated in the decision-making” and whether the VRA provided a compelling reason to justify the intentional use of race in drawing legislative districts.
Thirty-two years after Justice Thomas first argued the practice of setting up districts on the basis of race should not continue, the Court held the VRA did not compel creation of a majority-minority district, that the Constitution very rarely permits a state to discriminate on the basis of race, and when a state does discriminate, the courts must apply strict scrutiny. (So far, the court has found compelling interest only when it is to “avoiding imminent and serious risks to human safety in prisons” and “remediating specific, identified instances of unconstitutional past discrimination.)
The relevant section of the VRA establishes a violation only when members of a racial group have “less opportunity than others of the electorate to elect representatives of their choice.” Minority voters are entitled to nothing less and nothing more. Consequently, states are not barred from drawing districts on nonracial factors, even if that achieves a partisan advantage. In this case, it was uncontestably true that, following a court directive to create an additional majority-black district, there was an “express acknowledgment that race played a role in the drawing of district lines.”
The Consequences of Abandoning State Racial Engineering
At least two states, Alabama and Tennessee, have already begun redistricting now that they are no longer compelled to discriminate by law. The implications are far greater than simply the fashioning of congressional districts. As Jeff Childers wrote, it will affect the composition of “local boards, commissions and councils.”
One of the most politically explosive Supreme Court decisions ever issued. What the Court did in Louisiana v. Callais was not just about one badly drawn Louisiana map, or even about potential GOP pickups in the 2026 midterms. This story is so much bigger than that. SCOTUS quietly unwound four decades of political pod politics that corrupted our body politic top-to-bottom.
In plain English, the ruling is already triggering at least four massive downstream shocks -- three of which nobody has bothered pointing out to us, even though they are probably the biggest stories of all:
- A red‑state rush to redraw maps before the midterms, now unshackled from court‑mandated “majority‑minority” districts and old Section 2 racial targets.
- A blue‑state brick wall, which ambitious Democratic gerrymanders and constitutional amendments are suddenly slamming into because their legal doorway just evaporated into thin air.
- A federal lawfare Uno-reverse, with Trump’s DOJ already promising to apply its civil‑rights powers to attack the race‑driven maps it used to defend, and to enforce Callais in “every state that has such a district.”
- An earthquake rumbling under local government, where decades‑old Section 2-era “remedies” -- single‑member districts, special minority seats, and other race‑tuned structures in cities, counties, and school boards -- are now open to attack as potentially unconstitutional racial engineering. (Racers, take your marks.)
Only the first one -- the red‑state map rush -- was widely predicted. The other three, especially the local effects, are what make this political earthquake a magnitude‑8 event with aftershocks for two generations.
It’s my experience that minority politicians are no worse, no more radical, and no crazier than anyone else when they represent other than majority-minority districts, that is, when they need to persuade a broader voter base. If I’m right about this, we can look forward to a Congress that more of us of all races and ethnicities can respect.
Clarice Feldman
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/05/scotus_tolls_the_bell_on_racial_gerrymandering.html
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