In case you’re wondering why the highly partisan Supreme Court decided to uphold the California redistricting plan when it doesn’t benefit Donald Trump, Ian Millhiser explains that removing all barriers to partisan gerrymander is one of their highest priorities. They believe, correctly, that this will benefit the Republicans which is in keeping with their larger agenda.
The Supreme Court used to permit federal courts to hear lawsuits alleging that a legislative map drawn to benefit one party or the other violates the Constitution. But the Court’s Republican majority shut these lawsuits down in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019). Five years later, in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP (2024), the Republican justices went a step further, declaring that “as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.”
Having abolished federal lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders, the Court’s Republicans then started to dismantle longstanding legal rules prohibiting racial gerrymanders — that is, legislative maps that are drawn to minimize the voting power of voters of a particular race. Indeed, the Court’s recent decision in LULAC, the Texas gerrymandering case, was a major milestone in this broader project to shut down anti-gerrymandering lawsuits. Among other things, LULAC held that “ambiguous” evidence must always be construed against a plaintiff alleging that a map was drawn for impermissible racial reasons.
It probably goes too far to say that this Court would allow literally any racial gerrymander to survive judicial scrutiny. If a state passed a law called the “White Supremacist We Want to Bring Back Jim Crow, So These Maps Were Drawn by the Ku Klux Klan Act of 2026,” it is likely that at least two of the Court’s Republicans would vote to strike it down. But LULAC and other recent Supreme Court decisions impose such high barriers on anti-gerrymandering plaintiffs that a state legislature’s racist intent would need to be extraordinarily explicit before this Court would step in.
And so the Republican justices voted to uphold a Democratic gerrymander in Tangipa. They did not do so because they are particularly worried about Democratic voting rights or Democratic chances in the midterms. They did so because that decision is consistent with their broader project to eliminate nearly all lawsuits challenging gerrymanders.
John Roberts has been on a crusade to end minority voting protections his entire career so this is perfectly in line with that. It doesn’t bode well for the case Louisiana v. Callais that could finally gut the Voting Right’s Act, restoring the ability of white conservatives to draw maps that will essentially disenfranchising Black Americans across a wide swathe of the country. That’s been on the agenda for all the decades since the act was originally passed.
I certainly hope they don’t go that way but I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t which means we will have a very big problem winning a majority in the House going forward.