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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.
In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.
I am a bit of two minds about this. The Voting Rights Act seems like a band-aid solution, and if this SCOTUS is fond of one thing, it is ripping off liberal band-aids.
But even a quokka (did I use that term right?) in an ivory tower like me who would prefer color-blind policies can see that there is a big narrative difference between 'a third of Louisiana voted for Democrats and not win a single Representative' and 'the Blacks of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, and yet did not get a single Representative who is Black or a Democrat'. Both are bad, but the Blacks are a much more coherent group than people who vote for Democrats. You don't know if your coworker voted for Democrats, but you can certainly make an educated guess about their racial identification.
Democracy works pretty well compared to other political systems by convincing people dissatisfied with the status quo that that they can change things within the system, but it requires a widespread belief that the playing field is at least somewhat level. If you tell a peasant in an absolute monarchy 'if you have policy suggestions, simply become a great knight, accomplish heroic deeds until the king offers you the hand of his daughter and you inherit the kingdom', he will object that this seems very unlikely to work outside fairy tales and decide to try to use pitchforks to campaign for policy changes instead.
As an intuition pump, consider states worth 300 EC votes using state legislatures to pool their electors and award them to the winner of the overall popular vote over these states, effectively forming a single superstate for the purpose of presidential elections. Suppose Louisiana is not part of that block. How would Louisianans feel about this arrangement? Would they go "How other states assign their EC votes does not affect Louisiana", or would they declare "With this setup, the votes of us will never affect the outcome of presidential elections, ergo whoever gets elected is not our president".
I think the root of the problem is that states are competing for national attention, and doing the sane thing and awarding EC votes or Representatives in proportion to the state-wide vote will guarantee that a state will not be worth fighting over. If Colorado decided to do that, national parties would just ignore it completely. "To win one measly EC vote through campaigning, I would need to convince another 10% of their population to vote for me instead of the other guy? Hard pass."
Instead, it is the interests of states to be battleground states. "Half of our voters prefer Democrats, and half Republicans. The tiniest margin will decide who gets all of our EC votes and Representatives. So you better try hard to send gifts our way to convince the marginal voter to prefer you."
If doing the sane and stable thing leads to you being ignored and borderline flip-flopping makes you the center of attention, then states will behave as if they had BPD.
It's zero-sum. If you maximize the representation of black voters, you minimize those of non-black voters. Maximizing the representation of black voters does not make the playing field level, it tilts it in their direction (and, in practice, towards the Democratic party). So you can't get a widespread belief that the playing field is level by doing that; instead, you get the (accurate) belief among the non-blacks that the playing field is skewed towards the blacks. In the recent past and in most analysis this sort of thing is discarded; only the feelings of the minorities count. But there's no good reason for that to be true.
It might be zero-sum, but with an obvious Schelling point. The Schelling point is proportional representation (PR), where you basically just round the vote to the reciprocal of the number of representatives. If your state has five representatives and with a vote of R: 63%, D: 37%, you would end up with three seats for the GOP and two for the Dems. Anyone who prefers another distribution (2-3, 4-1 and 5-0 could all be gerrymandered) will have a hell of a time arguing that their system is actually fairer.
This is similar to how 'one man (or adult citizen of whatever gender identity, these days), one vote' is an obvious Schelling point. Sure, you can argue that instead voting power should be weighted according to some characteristic, perhaps income tax or education attainment or score on a civics test or the voters ability to fight in a civil war or number of children not dependent on social security, but the chance of convincing most of the others that any of these is actually a fairer way to assign voting power is basically nil.
I would be surprised if the VRA had actually lead to red states being gerrymandered in a way which favored the Dems beyond PR, though it certainly led to limits on how much the state could be gerrymandered in favor of the GOP. The obvious move would be to say 'okay, the VRA says the Blacks get two majority districts, so we will make districts where the majority is Black and the rest is university towns full of pinko liberals'.
Personally, I see gerrymandering as an injustice, and there is no right to equality in injustice. If the VRA limits gerrymandering all of your ethnic minorities into a single district, the GOP could push for federal legislation prohibiting putting all of your religious minorities (e.g. Evangelicals) into a single district.
Even if this is true, this means blue states could be gerrymandered in a way which favored the Democrats (as with Massachusetts, 9 Democratic representatives to 0 GOP in a state that's about 30% Republican) while red states could not be gerrymandered in a way which favored the GOP.
Equality in injustice is better than inequality in injustice favoring one side... from the viewpoint of the other side.
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