PACKERS AND CRACKERS

CALLAIS DIDN’T END THE VOTING-RIGHTS WAR. IT OPENED THE FLOODGATES.

The Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais was formally about whether Louisiana’s new congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In practice, it has already become something bigger: a signal flare to state lawmakers that the old rules constraining racial vote dilution have weakened. The Court’s 6–3 ruling struck down Louisiana’s map, and legal analysts at the Center for American Progress and the Brennan Center say the decision substantially rewrote Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by making it far harder for voters of color to challenge discriminatory maps without proof of intentional discrimination. 

Tennessee moved like it had been waiting for permission. Inside Elections reported that Republicans pushed a map meant to turn the state’s current 8–1 Republican U.S. House delegation into 9–0. Nashville station WSMV reported that Democrats sued immediately, arguing the new map eliminated a majority-Black voting district and would create chaos ahead of the 2026 election. Memphis outlet Action News 5 reported that Rep. Steve Cohen and other candidates joined that lawsuit, arguing the midstream redraw came after multiple election deadlines had already passed. And the Congressional Black Caucus said the new Tennessee plan split Shelby County, including majority-Black Memphis, into three districts and even removed a state-law provision requiring voters to be notified when polling places change after redistricting. 

Alabama followed the same playbook. The Alabama Reflector reported that lawmakers opened a special session to create mechanisms for new primaries if courts allow different congressional lines to be used, and later passed those bills. Reuters reported that Alabama Republicans then asked the Supreme Court to let the state use a more GOP-friendly map ahead of the midterms. That request matters because a lower court had previously ordered Alabama to use a map with two majority-Black districts out of seven, and Reuters noted Black voters make up about a quarter of Alabama’s electorate. In plain language: the state is trying to claw back Black representation it had already been forced to recognize. 

Virginia is the other side of the same national equation. There, the issue was not a Black-majority district in the same direct sense as Tennessee or Alabama. But the effect still matters. AP reported that Virginia’s Supreme Court struck down the voter-approved Democratic redistricting plan on procedural grounds, leaving the current 6-Democrat, 5-Republican map in place for 2026. AP also reported Democrats had hoped the new map could net as many as four more U.S. House seats, partly to offset Republican gains elsewhere. So while Tennessee and Alabama moved to reduce Black electoral power in the South, Virginia lost one of the clearest Democratic counterweights. 

Put those stories together and the pattern is hard to miss. Reuters reported that Republicans are fighting to maintain control of Congress, and AP reported that the Virginia ruling, combined with the Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the GOP’s redistricting advantage heading into the midterms. The Guardian described the speed of state action after Callais as “breathtaking” for voting-rights activists, highlighting Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida as examples of rapid efforts to undo Black-majority or Democratic-majority districts. This is not ordinary map maintenance. It is a power strategy. 

Through a CRT lens, the move is brutally familiar: power denies race is the point while rearranging Black communities until Black voting strength counts less almost everywhere. In Louisiana, State Sen. Jay Morris said he asked a demographer not to consider race or party, yet one of his proposed maps concentrated Democratic and Black voters into a single district at about 60 percent each. The Legal Defense Fund warned that Callais now permits states to use partisan gerrymandering as a broad excuse to deny Black voters a real voice. That is the civic emergency here. Not just who wins a seat, but whether Black voting power can be thinned out, renamed “politics,” and laundered into legality.