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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25858 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 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.

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