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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Did The Motte talk about the latest set of oral arguments at SCOTUS for Louisiana vs. Callais? The case is a continuation of the NAACP LDF's efforts to turn this big red blob of a congressional district that Louisiana created into a slightly longer contiguous red blob, but with new lines and a new congressional district. If SCOTUS was to affirm the district court's ruling, then the LDF will have won an additional majority black district in a state that is 33% black. For the sake of context, numbers I find put the state at 30% black in 1990, so this is a relatively stable share.

The decision to upend Louisiana's proposed 2022 map, it was be argued, is what Federal law requires. Section 2 of the VRA has been amended, extended, and litigated on several occasions since the 1965. In 1986, SCOTUS described the Gingles test to determine whether a majority-minority district should be created. I'm sure there are pages of nuance before and betwixt each:

  1. The racial or language minority group "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district";
  2. The minority group is "politically cohesive" (meaning its members tend to vote similarly); and
  3. The "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate.

According to the NAACP, when the LDF received their favorable decision against the state in 2024, a group of "self-described 'non-African American [Louisiana] voters'" challenged this on the basis of 14th and 15th amendment issues. SCOTUS first heard the case in March of this year, but decided to schedule reargument (somewhat uncommon) which occurred last week. (PDF) The nature of the questions now in play led to a flurry of articles concerned that "justices could upend decades of court decisions holding that states may — and sometimes must — use race-conscious redistricting to protect the voting power of minorities." Other outlets like The Federalist take a Buzzfeed-esque dunk list approach to reporting the case.

My understanding is nobody knows just what kind of scope in ruling we should expect, but that the questions to follow suggest something broader than a Yes/No to a district map. There are all kinds of tidbits worth debating. There's my Big Questions which SCOTUS will not answer like: by how much does the fact my US representative is a black man, whose race I do not share, mean he doesn't represent me? It seems every minority whose vote doesn't represent their A) race and B) party can be considered un(der)represented, even if Congress hasn't provided a statute or adopted a different system of representation to resolve this.

At the time the VRA was written the demographics were very different to today's. Kavanaugh asked Nelson, who was arguing for the LDF, whether there should be a time limit on court ordered, law enforced racial voting maps. He receives a frank reply that is basically "lol, never." It's statute it doesn't just go away unless Congress changes it. That makes sense, but seems to force the hand of a potential majority that has questions on how this all works out.

Justice Jackson covers the more popular argument I see in the wild. She says,

"[Louisiana is] not departing. Their map looks fine, but because of all of these race-based [economic] effects, because of the history of Jim Crow, which I appreciate happened a long time ago, but I'm positing and Gingles allows for us to see where those effects are still occurring."

To her credit, she only mentions the word disparity once in arguments. This is the argument that until blacks disperse themselves geographically as other minorities have, or achieve similar outcomes to something, then states are required to continue to grant them majority-minority districts.

If you transported my liberal sensibilities to 1965 you'd probably convince me with ease that this little unconstitutional carve out was justified and workable. Not so much these days. I don't look forward to a total upending of the VRA house of cards. Sounds messy, but this is the consequence of previous pragmatisms of SCOTUS. The pragmatist leverage left, for me, is the fact gerrymandering is cynical by its nature. If you leave it to states without limitation, then they will discriminate by race for the very reason Justice Jackson says: blacks vote Democrat reliably enough to target. Which means we would still have to answer constitutional questions about lines on a map.

I’m confused why people are acting like the Court siding with the plaintiffs in this case is a likely outcome when they ruled just two years ago in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama had to create two majority-black districts on the basis of section 2 of the VRA. Roberts and Kavanaugh sided with the liberals in that case. Why would the exact same judges then turn around and declare that actually, requiring states to create a certain number of majority-minority districts is unconstitutional?

It looks like that case laid the groundwork here. It was a 5-4 decision. Roberts I am less sure of, but Kavanaugh concurred in part:

the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future. But Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.

"Hint hint", says Kavanaugh, "what a shame." In the same year as Allen v. Milligan, the "temporal argument" gets applied SFFA vs. Harvard. He brings it up in oral arguments for LA vs. Callais. There might be other details in how each state framed their cases that dissuaded Roberts, or other tactical considerations. I briefly looked through the history of this one after netstack asked a question one comment below.

I find the temporal argument agreeable, but am less sure what it is based on. Times up! I guess lots of talk was had in the 60-70s about many of the positive discrimination stuff being limited and we just kind of forgot about those?

I’m confused about the stay on Callais v. Landry. It was 6-3, with Jackson pointing out that they’ve previously allowed redistricting with less lead time. Why did the rest of the court want a stay? Was it going to get mooted if the legislature workshopped an alternative to their 2024 map?

Wow. Yeah, the majority said Purcell! The stay preserved the map for the election. Jackson dissented and wrote it's not applicable there's totally enough time for remediation.

"Purcell has no role to play here. There is little risk of voter confusion from a new map being imposed this far out... I would have let the District Court’s remedial process run its course before considering whether our emergency intervention was warranted."

The District Court has not yet selected a remedial map, and, were it not for this Court’s intervention, it may have selected a map that complies with both §2 and the Equal Protection Clause. I would have waited until after the remedial process concluded (when it would have been clearer if the intervenors’ faced irreparable harm) to consider their arguments.

I have no idea if the Purcell time crunch was real or a pretext.

Why did the rest of the court want a stay? Was it going to get mooted if the legislature workshopped an alternative to their 2024 map?

LA draws one the district court accepts, or the district court imposes one. If you consider a narrow "did LA have good reason to use race here" preferable from a turn into 2025 "Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution" then punting it back to district court is a way to avoid being in those oral arguments last week with the VRA coming into view.

Is that reasonable?

If I read all that right, then the courts have held that a minority must be given their own voting district because they are not the majority. If minority's "preferred candidates" don't win, they must be made to win, because the majority must not be allowed to elect their preferred candidates. We call this "democracy".

Nnnnnnno?

  • In Robinson v. Ardoine, a court convinced the state that their 2022 map was going to be thrown out for racial gerrymandering. Given its tortured outlines, that was probably correct.

  • Callais v. Landry challenged the subsequent 2024 map for racial gerrymandering. Given the statements made in the legislature, again, this was probably correct. A district court thought so, too, and threw it out…

  • …until the Supreme Court stayed it 6-3. I don’t understand the politics here. Maybe the conservatives didn’t want it to get mooted?

  • Now the SC is actually hearing it.

I wouldn’t describe any of those in your terms.

We need a bigger House. If we have 10,000 Representatives split proportionally, we wouldn't be squabbling over how to best gerrymander each little slice.

Pros:

  • Less money being raised - representative spends more time governing than fundraising.
  • Representatives would be "Friends of Friends," the ratio would be back to 30,000:1 citizens:representatives, which is where it was at the start of our country. It would be easier to know your representative and for the representative to actually represent a geographic area.
  • Much harder for parties to whip/control the House, which would lead to less gridlock/conformity.

Many other questions are along similar logistical lines: how would voting work? Would they use clickers? What if the clickers break? How could C-SPAN get the cameras in? Wouldn’t a large House end up more under the sway of leadership than ever? It’s like nobody’s ever seen a parliament of a few thousand people!

In fact, we know how to run a legislative body consisting of several thousand people, because Americans do just that all the time. I’ve even participated in one!

The 2014 Minnesota Republican Party state convention had 2,020 voting delegates at its opening. I was an alternate, but ended up serving as a voting delegate. It was a pretty thrilling day! The GOP senate endorsement was closely fought, and we went to ten ballots over two days. (I had to drop out after the first night.) We followed Robert’s Rules of Order, which work just fine for huge crowds, with standard convention rules. We cast paper ballots and handed them to trusted ballot-counting teams. The House floor “debates” you see on C-SPAN are mostly on-camera onanism to an audience of six or seven people, but, at the MNGOP convention, we fiercely debated the merits of each candidate among ourselves—not so much on mic, but person to person. The candidates courted us. Their surrogates courted us. Candidate teams were back in their offices just off-site, printing up supportive flyers and (as the losing candidates grew desperate) nasty slanders for rapid distribution on the floor.

It was a blast. In the end, the body reached a collective decision. Our candidate was not my first choice, but he was far from my last. Similar conventions happen everywhere in the country, year in and year out, for both parties, without major drama or disaster. The House can run just as smoothly! This is what a republic looks like!

Combined with an amendment about making districts boundaries as close to their geographic center as possible, it would create a more fair system overall.

I like it! My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it, preferably so tall that you can't see the top from the bottom, and give whoever is taking a turn speaking a levitating platform to stand on that can move around the chamber while they talk.

Joking aside (although I do really like the idea at first), how would various committees work? Just equally large?

Maybe a traditional declaration by each speaker. Something along the lines of 'I am the Senate?' and then a vigorous folk somersault.

My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it

An open air amphitheater perhaps? One in which we can host bloodsports that better suit the brutal nature of politics in form and function. Besides aesthetics weather adds a new X factor. The arena would also compliment the return of state-sanctioned duels that keeps the massive lower house orderly. We can call it the Polisseum.

The Sergeant at Arms is badly in need of an update to modern law-enforcement standards, RoboCop style.

The article goes into it a little, but right now we already have 9,000 congressional staffers. It already takes about 10,000 people to run congress, but only a small percentage is elected.

The hope is that if races become smaller, each congressman needs to fundraise less money and spend less time campaigning. Smaller races will be won in the tens of thousands instead of millions. They will have more time to actually run the country and can decrease staff accordingly.

Committees are already divided into subcommittees. It's not unreasonable to divide that even further, into sub-subcommittees.

I really don't understand how we got into this mess of congressional redistricting. We don't "redistrict" state lines every few years to make senate seats "fairer" in any sense. Why didn't congressional districts just follow this obviously parallel pattern using (e.g.) counties? For that matter, why didn't this get left up to a state-by-state basis to determine how congressional seats are apportioned so that some states could gerrymander if they wanted and others could have a fixed-for-forever set of districts? I don't know if this would result in better outcomes, but it would certainly be more transparent and consistent.

I would love it if anyone could provide a detailed history of this whole mess that starts from the articles of confederation until now.

The Senate was designed from the beginning to give outsized representation to small populations. The House was designed to give proportional representation based on population. Making the House into a Senate with one extra step buggers that design.

But also just look at the numbers for New York State circa 2000 to 2010, in just one census. Percentage wise the fastest growing counties grew by 10%, the fastest shrinking ones shrank by 10%, by raw numbers +50k vs -30k. Take that over a very long time frame and you would have absolutely bonkers districts.

The bigger problem with redistricting is that before we get into crass political motives there are a whole bunch of different ways that people want the congressional districts to be drawn. Everyone wants geometrical simplicity, the smallest number of lines and vertices possible to delineate an area, else they mock the complicated shapes drawn by the map makers. Everyone wants demographic consistency, we should feel some commonality with our fellow voters. Everyone wants geographic defensibility, the district should constitute a defined region that is used in common understanding and not a random slice of people, the line shouldn't run right through a neighborhood. Basically the ideal in people's heads is square districts that contain a clear common identity.

And that's basically impossible while also achieving the same population, but also changes over time. When I was born my neighborhood was much less developed and more rural, people around here felt more in common with the areas north and west of us, went to the same John Deere dealerships and farm shows as the hicks. Now, after decades of homebuilding, the same area has a population that has more in common with the city to the east of us, going to the same coffee shops and yoga studios. A steady district containing the same geographic area would fail on multiple fronts over time.

It sounds like you're also interested in context long before the modern era. For that, probably the most important thing to check out is the debate over the Apportionment Act of 1842. Before then, plenty of states used "general tickets". I can't describe it any better than here:

Under this system, voters could cast as many votes as there were seats to be filled in each state, while voting for each candidate only once. In practice, this typically led to voters selecting each candidate on a slate provided by a political party. Proponents argued this method led to more cohesive party delegations, and states that used general tickets almost uniformly sent single-party delegations to Congress.

In 1842, Congress mandated that the states create districts for federal congressional representatives sent to the House. Thus almost inherently requiring some form of redistricting. If you don't make adjustments over time, you almost surely end up with "rotten boroughs" over time, not unlike what was described by the Reynolds v. Sims wiki article @Lewis2 linked:

for example, in the Nevada Senate, the smallest district had 568 people, while the largest had approximately 127,000 people.

That's unlikely to be politically tenable really long-term, so the main questions become who does it, how often do they do it, and what rules do they have to follow when doing it. Even if you want to say, "We're just not going to do it and keep the same districts forever," you're likely to still do it eventually, just when it becomes so politically untenable that you end up with a crisis, as in the Historia Civilis video concerning Britain. And of course, since it's so hard to find durable political compromises that extend well over time concerning those three main questions, we also ended up with judicial meddling in the process.

Districting in general is A Hard Problem.

Thank you especially for the link about the Apportionment Act of 1842. That's exactly the type of reference I was looking for!

Reynolds v. Sims has a lot to do with it. To summarize, in 1964, the Court ruled that having fixed districts (e.g., one state senator per county) unconstitutionally violates the “one man, one vote” rule.

Ah, Reynolds v. Sims, the case that declared the constitutionally defined structure of the United States Senate unconstitutional.

The justices did address that complaint. tl;dr: States are sovereign, counties are not.

Much has been written since our decision in Baker v. Carr about the applicability of the so-called federal analogy to state legislative apportionment arrangements. After considering the matter, the court below concluded that no conceivable analogy could be drawn between the federal scheme and the apportionment of seats in the Alabama Legislature under the proposed constitutional amendment. We agree with the District Court, and find the federal analogy inapposite and irrelevant to state legislative districting schemes. Attempted reliance on the federal analogy appears often to be little more than an after-the-fact rationalization offered in defense of maladjusted state apportionment arrangements. The original constitutions of 36 of our States provided that representation in both houses of the state legislatures would be based completely, or predominantly, on population. And the Founding Fathers clearly had no intention of establishing a pattern or model for the apportionment of seats in state legislatures when the system of representation in the Federal Congress was adopted. Demonstrative of this is the fact that the Northwest Ordinance, adopted in the same year, 1787, as the Federal Constitution, provided for the apportionment of seats in territorial legislatures solely on the basis of population.

The system of representation in the two Houses of the Federal Congress is one ingrained in our Constitution, as part of the law of the land. It is one conceived out of compromise and concession indispensable to the establishment of our federal republic. Arising from unique historical circumstances, it is based on the consideration that, in establishing our type of federalism a group of formerly independent States bound themselves together under one national government. Admittedly, the original 13 States surrendered some of their sovereignty in agreeing to join together "to form a more perfect Union." But at the heart of our constitutional system remains the concept of separate and distinct governmental entities which have delegated some, but not all, of their formerly held powers to the single national government. The fact that almost three-fourths of our present States were never, in fact, independently sovereign does not detract from our view that the so-called federal analogy is inapplicable as a sustaining precedent for state legislative apportionments. The developing history and growth of our republic cannot cloud the fact that, at the time of the inception of the system of representation in the Federal Congress, a compromise between the larger and smaller States on this matter averted a deadlock in the Constitutional Convention which had threatened to abort the birth of our Nation. In rejecting an asserted analogy to the federal electoral college in Gray v. Sanders, we stated:

We think the analogies to the electoral college, to districting and redistricting and to other phases of the problems of representation in state or federal legislatures or conventions, are inapposite. The inclusion of the electoral college in the Constitution, as the result of specific historical concerns, validated the collegiate principle despite its inherent numerical inequality, but implied nothing about the use of an analogous system by a State in a statewide election. No such specific accommodation of the latter was ever undertaken, and therefore no validation of its numerical inequality ensued.

Political subdivisions of States—counties, cities, or whatever—never were and never have been considered as sovereign entities. Rather, they have been traditionally regarded as subordinate governmental instrumentalities created by the State to assist in the carrying out of state governmental functions. As stated by the Court in Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, these governmental units are "created as convenient agencies for exercising such of the governmental powers of the State as may be entrusted to them," and the "number, nature and duration of the powers conferred upon [them]… and the territory over which they shall be exercised rests in the absolute discretion of the State." The relationship of the States to the Federal Government could hardly be less analogous.

I understand their reasoning, I just think it's a dog's breakfast. The fact that the Senate and electoral college were products of political compromise based on the specific context of the time tells us nothing about how the sovereign states may design their own electoral systems. What place does the Supreme Court have telling the states whether local conditions call for a geographically apportioned legislative house or not? The Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress (and, by extension, the federal courts) the power to interfere in state elections only to the extent necessary to ensure equal protection of the law, and I do not think that power extends to invalidating longstanding and facially neutral electoral systems.

Thank you! Reading through the article was very informative. At the end of the article there is a quote from a law professor that this was the "best Supreme Court decision since 1960". I would love a follow on detailed analysis about legal opinions on this court case and the extent to which conservatives/liberals have different opinions.

If you're worried about any kind of minority, racial or otherwise, having representation in government, there are better ways than carving up districts where they'll plausibly win a seat.

Enforced gerrymandering is a hack to get a desired outcome some of the time, when with a refactor we could build the desired outcome into the system. Add or change one of the legislative houses so that we have proportional representation.

I mean the straightforwards way to give blacks representation in Louisiana is to have the blacks elect 1/3 of the reps and whites(ok, 'everyone else', but in practice they are white) the other two thirds. That just happens to be illegal under the VRA, too- AFAICT the black majority districts is illegal too, just less blatantly so.

Even that straightforward approach has some interesting questions to handle about rounding. In this case, 1/3 of 6 seats works out, but it's not hard to look at other states and imagine "24.9 percent of two seats" or things like that.

This is well studied problem in parliamentary democracies where the seats are assigned at the level of the whole country, rather than by district. It is also applicable to determining for each first level division of a country how many seats it should have in the lower house, given the population (not counting Indians not taxed) of each such division.

Apportionment is the key word here, and here is a cool demo showing various methods (click on the name of the method for further description).

I'm going to get on my hobby horse about apportionment.

First, I'm going to assume everyone is familiar with the Constitutional Apportionment Amendment.

For those unaware, there are three premises to this amendment, although it only lists three stages instead of repeating forever:

First, there is maximum number of people per seat.

Second, based on the total population and the number of people per seat, there is a number of total seats.

Third, every time the number of total seats increases by 100, the number of people per seat increase by 10,000.

This started with 30k people per seat for all populations between 0 and 3 million (3m/30k = 100 seats), then 40k between 3 and 8 million (8m/40k = 200 seats), and then 50k for anything higher than that.

If this was continued, and given the 331m on the 2020 census, 308m from 2010, and 281m from 2000, the minimum house seat count would be 1564, 1625, and 1700. In 2000, we'd have 180k per seat maximum, in 2010 it would be 190k, and in 2020 we'd be able to have districts of up to 200k people, and no fewer than 1700 seats. Apportioned so that Wyoming gets its 3 representatives, that puts our max size at 192,283.

This also fixes the Electoral College. Wyoming goes from 1 representative to 3 (2.9 rounded up), while California goes from 52 to a whopping 205. The electoral votes are these +2, so instead of 18x the electoral vote, it's 41x. That's still not equal to the 69x population difference, but it goes a long way towards smoothing the worst problems.

If someone wants to tell me how to format a table I'll make this prettier, but here are the counts by my reckoning.

California 205
Texas 151
Florida 112
New York 105
Pennsylvania 67
Illinois 66
Ohio 61
Georgia 55
North Carolina 54
Michigan 52
New Jersey 48
Virginia 44
Washington 40
Arizona 37
Massachusetts 36
Tennessee 35
Indiana 35
Maryland 32
Missouri 32
Wisconsin 30
Colorado 30
Minnesota 29
South Carolina 26
Alabama 26
Louisiana 24
Kentucky 23
Oregon 22
Oklahoma 20
Connecticut 18
Utah 17
Iowa 16
Nevada 16
Mississippi 15
Kansas 15
Arkansas 15
New Mexico 11
Nebraska 10
West Virginia 9
Idaho 9
New Hampshire 7
Hawaii 7
Maine 7
Delaware 5
Rhode Island 5
Montana 5
South Dakota 4
North Dakota 4
Alaska 3
Vermont 3
Wyoming 3

With so many votes in a single state, I would also add the Nebraska/Maine-style split electors to the mix to dilute the power of swing states.

If someone wants to tell me how to format a table

There is a link to "formatting help" directly underneath the comment preview.

StateRepresentatives
California205
Texas151
Florida112
New York105
Pennsylvania67
Illinois66
Ohio61
Georgia55
North Carolina54
Michigan52
New Jersey48
Virginia44
Washington40
Arizona37
Massachusetts36
Tennessee35
Indiana35
Maryland32
Missouri32
Wisconsin30
Colorado30
Minnesota29
South Carolina26
Alabama26
Louisiana24
Kentucky23
Oregon22
Oklahoma20
Connecticut18
Utah17
Iowa16
Nevada16
Mississippi15
Kansas15
Arkansas15
New Mexico11
Nebraska10
West Virginia9
Idaho9
New Hampshire7
Hawaii7
Maine7
Delaware5
Rhode Island5
Montana5
South Dakota4
North Dakota4
Alaska3
Vermont3
Wyoming3

Without drastically changing how representatives work, Montana's one house seat isn't going to reflect its entire populace. By some definitions, single-seat states are the most gerrymandered (slaps roof "this district can fit so many minorities without giving any of them representation!"), although clearly not so by local legislative intent.

Montana has two seats. The one seat states are- Wyoming, Vermont, Delaware, the Dakotas, and Alaska.

TIL: It had only one until 2022 (and had two previously last century). My memory wasn't completely wrong there.

Many of the arguments for the Voting Rights Act argue for it on the basis that blacks, as a racial group deserve representation. Thing is, there's nothing which says that in the Constitution. Further, voting representation is zero-sum; if you give it to one person or group you necessarily take it away from someone else. The Constitution does prescribe equal protection. There is no way to reconcile that with a requirement not to dilute a minority group's voting power. The Supreme Court should acknowledge this, and declare all precedent otherwise a mistake and as dead as Roe v. Wade.

They won't.

What’s wrong with the 15th Amendment? It specifically mentions race.

I suppose you could argue that it only says “vote” and that “votes” don’t have to mean “representation.” I’d say that’s splitting hairs. The postwar amendments were designed to secure the rights of freed slaves. Then they got a hundred years of stress tests by motivated Southerners. You’re not going to discover some fresh loophole.

The postwar amendments were designed to secure the rights of freed slaves.

And they were written in the same idealistically neutral manner as all the other founding documents; it was the later activist Supreme Courts that made the preferences explicit.

Ames v. Ohio was pleasantly unanimous, but Harvard v. SFFA was not and even the majority had Roberts keeping in a how-to section to keep discriminating; I suspect whatever comes out of Callais will closer resemble the latter.

Here is the text of the 15th Amendment:

Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude–

Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Nothing in the text gives specific races any special representation. It gives citizens of all races the right to vote. A black person in any given electoral district has exactly the same voting power as a white person in the same district.

The issue is that Congress and the courts have used section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (text here) to enforce a collective right on the part of black people as a cohesive race to get their own majority-minority electoral districts. There are a lot of reasons why this sort of makes sense, but it’s weird and not a direct consequence of the right enumerated in the 15th Amendment.

I more or less agree with those points.

I wanted to emphasize that the VRA has a clear basis in the 15th. Even if that’s the motte to a “special representation” bailey, it is enough to keep the Act constitutional. If there’s a reversal, it’s going to be limited to the subsequent layers of tests.

The Fifteenth Amendment protects citizens, not racial groups. It does not say, as the Gingles test does, that if enough blacks vote for the same party, that blacks must get a district. The Voting Rights Act was enacted 100 years after the end of the Civil War and has nothing to do with the rights of freed slaves.

Okay, but there is something in the Constitution which says black people deserve representation. That keeps the VRA constitutional even if subsequent tests were wrong. You’re not going to get a Dobbs-level reversal.

To be more specific, it says that people who are black get representation like everyone else; not that black people the group get representation

Okay, but there is something in the Constitution which says black people deserve representation

No, there is not. There is something in the Constitution which says that citizens get to vote regardless of their race. This does not mean they get the representative they desire.

The Constitution does prescribe equal protection.

Why doesn't this provide equal protection from the state drawing lines on a map every few years with the intent of limiting the impact of my vote/representation based on my race?

Why doesn't this provide equal protection from the state drawing lines on a map every few years with the intent of limiting the impact of my vote/representation based on my race?

My point is that the words on paper straightforwardly do. But most members of the Supreme Court don't want that, even if 5 or 6 justices realize that's indeed what the words on paper say. So they will either come up for some reason to punt longer, or they will make a decision which does say that states can't do that, but with enough loopholes to allow lower courts to keep maximizing the power of the black vote.

A Dobbs-like "We've been doing this wrong all along" is not likely at all.

total upending of the VRA house of cards, but this is the consequence of previous pragmatisms from SCOTUS.

IIRC most of the legislation in question from the 60s is, as-written, race-neutral. Those laws generally say "on the basis of race", not "against Black people". In practice there was an agreed-upon direction, and nobody until fairly recently (if now) has gotten much push-back on discrimination against white people, especially those in the South ("segregation" always brings to mind George Wallace, and never redlining in Detroit or Chicago --- not endorsing, just observing), and most of the interpretation of the text of the law by the judicial branch has been heavily-colored by this expectation.

But it is an interesting set of questions about how existing norms adopted against an era of bipolar segregation apply to a modern multi-polar racial society. Maybe there are some echoes of how some world leaders (Putin comes to mind) are attempting to claim a multi-polar world. Once we start considering, I dunno, French-speaking Cajuns, it isn't clear that our ideal districts can be planar. And what we'd do if we "ended segregation" and lived in homogenized neighborhoods (IIRC Singapore does this by fiat), how would we achieve what Gingles asks if the other reasons for the decision were still present?

That said, I think the easiest fix to gerrymandering is to move away from geographic districting, probably to a slate-of-candidates system.

The 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act are what are at issue here. The original Section 2 was just

SEC. 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

The later version is

(a)No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 10303(f)(2) of this title, as provided in subsection (b).

(b)A violation of subsection (a) is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.

Section 10303(f)(2) is about "language minority groups", which are certainly not mentioned in the 15th Amendment. But it's (b) which is the problem here. Taken literally, "in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice" says a racial, color, or language minority is having its right to vote violated precisely by the fact that it IS a minority. It establishes some sort of group right, one in direct contravention to the individual right guaranteed. If we have equal protection of individuals and "one man, one vote", then in as much as a minority group is cohesive in its political desires and opposed to a cohesive majority, then as a group it will have less opportunity (than the majority) to elect representatives of its choice. The Gingles test resolves this contradiction in favor of the group.

Can we safely assume that they will sit on this one until next summer, as per usual for any controversial case?

Most opinions get issued over the summer, so that seems pretty typical. Although IIRC this one was argued last year too, so it's a bit of an odd duck.

Or they'll find against it, but lower courts will ignore the ruling, as we've seen already.

In practice congressional maps go to the Supreme Court anyways, don’t they?

Yeah, but everything takes time. In the meanwhile, elections keep happening. And the Supreme Court already showed they don't have the balls to overturn an election, no matter how many procedural issues there are with it.

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