CALLAIS IS SPREADING

CALLAIS IS SPREADING: FROM BLACK VOTERS IN MISSISSIPPI TO NATIVE VOTERS IN NORTH DAKOTA

The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais is no longer just about Louisiana. It is becoming a national solvent poured over minority voting power.

On Monday, the Court sent voting-rights disputes from North Dakota and Mississippi back to lower courts for reconsideration after Callais. AP reports that the North Dakota case was brought by two Native American tribes after the Eighth Circuit ruled that only the federal government, not private voters or advocacy groups, can sue to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling threatened one of the main tools communities have used for decades to challenge racially discriminatory maps.

The Mississippi case is just as urgent. AP reports that Mississippi made a similar argument in a case over its state legislative map, and that the Supreme Court also sent that dispute back. The decision could jeopardize three new majority-Black state legislative districts, though the practical effect may not arrive until 2027.

This is the aftershock of Callais. In that case, the Court held that Louisiana’s new congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander after the state created a second majority-Black district in response to earlier Voting Rights Act litigation. The majority said Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act must enforce the Constitution, not “collide” with it; the dissent warned that the Court was weakening the very statute designed to protect voters from racial vote dilution.

The legal issue sounds technical. It is not. Section 2 is the part of the Voting Rights Act that allows voters to challenge election rules or district maps that deny minority communities an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. AP notes that private voters and advocacy groups have brought most Section 2 cases, making private enforcement a practical backbone of the law.

The Native American Rights Fund says the Supreme Court voided the Eighth Circuit’s decision in Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. Howe, which had stripped private individuals of the ability to enforce Section 2 after a trial court found North Dakota’s legislative map unlawful. NARF says the case now returns to the Eighth Circuit for further proceedings after Callais.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law says both the North Dakota and Mississippi cases were vacated and remanded to be considered under Callais, and that both cases involve the right of individuals to sue under Section 2. Courthouse News likewise reports that the high court ordered vote-dilution claims against Mississippi and North Dakota maps reviewed again under the new Voting Rights Act framework.

Here is the civic danger: when enforcement depends mostly on the federal government, communities must wait for Washington to care. When private enforcement is weakened, Black voters in Mississippi and Native voters in North Dakota lose a direct path to defend themselves. That is not neutral. That is power choosing who may knock on the courthouse door.

A CRT analysis names the deeper pattern. The global system of white supremacy often survives by turning equal-rights law into anti-repair law. First, Indigenous nations are dispossessed and marginalized. First, Black communities are segregated, diluted, and overruled. Then, when those communities use race-conscious civil-rights tools to repair the damage, the repair itself is treated as suspicious. The system wounds, then prosecutes the bandage.

The Trump era did not invent this structure, but it benefits from it. A democracy where minority communities cannot enforce voting rights is a democracy where power can be laundered through maps. The new map war is not only about congressional seats. It is about whether Black, Native, Latino, Asian, and other historically excluded communities have a living right to representation, or merely a paper right framed behind glass.

The answer must be peaceful and relentless: defend private enforcement, pass stronger voting-rights laws, fund local legal defense, educate voters, watch every remand, and refuse to let Callais become the new code word for quiet erasure.