{"id":71,"date":"2026-05-26T14:15:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T14:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=71"},"modified":"2026-05-26T14:15:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T14:15:06","slug":"how-callais-broke-the-voting-rights-act-and-weaponized-the-equal-protection-clause-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=71","title":{"rendered":"How Callais broke the Voting Rights Act and weaponized the equal protection clause: part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Please note that SCOTUS Outside Opinions constitute the views of outside contributors and do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court\u2019s drug test<\/a><\/p>\n

Much of the reporting on Louisiana v. Callais<\/em> suggests the court stopped short of finding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (which prohibits racial discrimination in voting) unconstitutional. The opinion\u2019s author, Justice Samuel Alito, took great pains to suggest as much. The court, he wrote, was not \u201cabandon[ing]\u201d the prior framework, that, for decades, authoritatively construed Section 2\u2019s sweep. Instead, Alito insisted, Callais<\/em> was merely an \u201cupdate\u201d to the evidence required under Section 2 to challenge racial vote dilution \u2013 <\/em>the drawing of electoral districts in a way that divides or submerges minority voting power.<\/p>\n

In truth, Callais<\/em> did something far more extreme: it rewrote the VRA, and in doing so, made vote-dilution claims impossible. Perhaps even more radically, Callais<\/em> may have turned the Fourteenth Amendment into a tool to undo<\/em> the legacy of this transformative statute.<\/p>\n

In this two-part series, we unpack Callais<\/em> piece by piece. In Part 1, we describe how Callais<\/em> eviscerated the VRA\u2019s ability to shield against the dilution of minority voting power. In Part 2, we will explain how the case turns racial gerrymandering claims under the Fourteenth Amendment into a sword against<\/em> maps enacted to comply with the VRA.<\/p>\n

Vote-dilution claims before<\/strong>\u00a0Callais<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has the \u201cmost important civil rights bill [ever] enacted by Congress.\u201d For our purposes, what is relevant are the 1982 amendments to the act that Congress passed in response to Mobile v. Bolden<\/em>, which held that the Constitution and the VRA outlawed exclusionary voting practices \u201conly if motivated by a discriminatory purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 1982 amendments sought to undo Bolden<\/em>\u2019s intent requirement. And Congress did so by outlawing voting practices that \u201cresult<\/em>[]\u201d in an abridgement of the right to vote \u201con account of race or color.\u201d Such a violation occurs if \u201ca class of citizens protected by subsection (a) . . . have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.\u201d Put together, then, Section 2 (as amended) requires that the class of citizens \u201cprotected by subsection (a)\u201d \u2013 those classified by \u201crace or color\u201d \u2013 have an opportunity to elect \u201crepresentatives of their choice\u201d equal to \u201cother members of the electorate.\u201d<\/p>\n

This enacted what others (including the Supreme Court) call a \u201cresults\u201d or \u201ceffects\u201d test for vote dilution claims. Such a test requires a benchmark relative to which<\/em> district boundaries dilute minority votes. If a Section 2 plaintiff claims that how a state\u2019s congressional districts are drawn dilutes<\/em> the number of House representatives that minority voters can elect, we need to know how many representatives they should<\/em> be able to elect. The amended Section 2 expressly disavows perfect proportionality as a benchmark (for instance, requiring 30% of congressional districts to be majority-Black if 30% of the state is Black). But below that limit, how do we know if district boundaries unlawfully dilute minority electoral opportunity?<\/p>\n

Enter Gingles v. Thornburg,<\/em> the seminal precedent interpreting the 1982 amendments. Gingles<\/em> operationalized a benchmark for Section 2 cases by laying out a series of \u201cpreconditions,\u201d or requirements that VRA plaintiffs must meet to successfully prove racial vote dilution. The first precondition required minority voters to be sufficiently numerous and compact to constitute a \u201creasonably configured district\u201d without violating \u201ctraditional districting criteria.\u201d Traditional districting criteria include principles like compactness (roughly speaking, the shape of the district is not too weird), contiguity (all parts of the district touch; there are no disconnected islands), and the preservation of political subdivisions (keeping towns and counties in the same districts). This first precondition requires plaintiffs to produce an \u201cillustrative map\u201d \u2013 a proposed map that demonstrates how minority voters could constitute a majority in a district that is reasonably shaped under these criteria.<\/p>\n

The second and third Gingles<\/em> preconditions asked whether there is (what the court interchangeably called) \u201cracially polarized voting\u201d or \u201cracial bloc voting.\u201d Racial bloc voting exists if \u201cminority group members constitute a politically cohesive unit and [] whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority\u2019s preferred candidates.\u201d Another way to think of racial bloc voting is just the presence of some (unspecified) high level of \u201cvoting in the districts [that is] racially correlated\u201d \u2013 that is, white citizens tend to vote for one type of candidate and Black citizens for another. Finally, after satisfying these preconditions, the final step is an open-ended \u201ctotality of the circumstances\u201d inquiry that asks whether the political process is \u201cequally open\u201d to minority voters.<\/p>\n

Without these conditions, the shape<\/em> of the district (and therefore what voters the district encompasses) cannot be responsible for the minority population\u2019s inability to elect candidates of its choice, as opposed to the fact that the group was too geographically dispersed or that the group simply did not have discernible \u201crepresentatives of their choice.\u201d Suppose that a state wants to disadvantage the political power of Black votersvis-\u00e0-vis white voters in a jurisdiction where white and Black voters have the same<\/em> distribution of political preferences. Even if the Black communities were split across different districts, the electoral outcomes wouldn\u2019t change, because the white voters (with the same preferences) would express the same distribution of votes.<\/p>\n

Putting these requirements together, for the past 40 years, the Supreme Court has set the benchmark for vote-dilution claims by (roughly) asking: Is it possible to draw additional districts where minority voters would elect their representative of choice, without violating traditional districting criteria?<\/p>\n

How<\/strong>\u00a0Callais<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0rewrote the Voting Rights Act<\/strong><\/p>\n

With that background in hand, we can now see how Callais<\/em> contorted this framework beyond recognition to extinguish Section 2\u2019s protections. It did so by issuing two new demands, misleadingly framed as evidentiary requirements.<\/p>\n

Read more Unending oral arguments<\/a><\/p>\n

First, Callais<\/em> held that \u201c[t]o satisfy the second and third [Gingles<\/em>] preconditions\u2014politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority\u2014the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation\u201d; they \u201cmust show that voters engage in racial bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.\u201d In other words, Alito asks for an analysis of racial bloc voting that \u201ccontrols for party.\u201d Which is to say, don\u2019t look at whether racial groups have different preferences between<\/em> parties \u2013 look at whether they have different preferences within<\/em> party. Or put graphically, don\u2019t look at Chart 1 below, look at Chart 2. He claims that this will prove whether racial bloc voting is \u201cexplained by\u201d partisanship as opposed to race.<\/p>\n

But these evidentiary demands about racial bloc voting either misunderstand or misrepresent Gingles<\/em>. Recall that Gingles<\/em> asked whether<\/em><\/strong> racial bloc voting was occurring because it was necessary for minorities\u2019 diluted opportunity to elect their preferred candidates to be explained by the map design \u2013<\/em> how the district boundaries are drawn (rather than, for example, a lack of common political preferences among the minority group). Alito\u2019s majority opinion in Callais<\/em> now asks what explains<\/em><\/strong> racial bloc voting, demanding that plaintiffs show that racial bloc voting is \u201cexplained\u201d by race rather than party. <\/p>\n

But that demand is nonsensical. As we saw above, racial bloc voting is usually operationalized as white voters preferring one party and Black voters preferring another \u2013 a correlation between race and party. It makes no sense to ask whether race or party is more responsible for the correlation<\/em>\u00a0between the two<\/em>. Conditioning the analysis on party does not prove that racial bloc voting is \u201cexplained by\u201d partisanship as opposed to race. It just changes what kind<\/em> of racial bloc voting we are looking at \u2013 from inter-party (Chart 1) to intra-party (Chart 2). So, Callais<\/em> effectively declares that one kind of opportunity for minority voters \u2013 the opportunity to elect the party<\/em> of their choice \u2013 cannot be a right secured by the VRA.<\/p>\n

Second, Callais<\/em> demands that plaintiffs\u2019 illustrative maps \u2013 the maps that demonstrate a reasonably configured majority-minority district can be drawn \u2013 \u201cmust meet all the State\u2019s legitimate districting objectives, including traditional districting criteria and the State\u2019s specified political goals.\u201d These \u201cspecified political goals\u201d require the plaintiffs to accommodate a state\u2019s preference for \u201ca specific margin of victory for certain incumbents\u201d or a \u201ctarget partisan distribution of voters.\u201d In other words, if Louisiana wants a 6-0 Republican map that preserves certain incumbents, Section 2 plaintiffs have to create a map that includes an additional majority-minority district \u2013 yet still produces that 6-0 result and<\/em> keeps those incumbents in power.<\/p>\n

This demand for illustrative maps that meet a state\u2019s \u201cspecified political goals\u201d makes Section 2 claims impossible whenever there is (1) racially polarized voting and (2) partisan gerrymandering. Imagine a state that has drawn all six of its congressional districts to be Republican despite the fact that 30% of its population is Black, and over 90% of that population votes Democratic. In that state, a Section 2 violation is logically impossible because, as Justice Elena Kagan points out in dissent, \u201c[a]ny map with a majority-Black district will not be a map with all Republican seats.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alito\u2019s stated basis for \u201ccontrol[ling] for party affiliation\u201d is the court\u2019s 2018 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause<\/em>, which held that \u201cclaims of partisan gerrymandering are not justiciable in federal court.\u201d Alito reads this holding on non-justiciability into an absolute right of paramount importance: the right of state legislatures to engage in partisan gerrymandering. Of course, nothing about Rucho<\/em> compelled this outcome. Rucho<\/em> was premised on the supposed lack of a legal standard to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering, because the question \u2013 \u201cHow much partisan dominance is too much?\u201d \u2013 raised a fundamentally political, not legal, question. But in racial vote-dilution claims, there was such a standard: Section 2 of the VRA, as interpreted by Gingles<\/em>. Therefore, even if we grant that Rucho<\/em> was correct on justiciability, the VRA question remained \u2013 as it has always been \u2013 whether states are free to partisan gerrymander in a way that dilutes<\/em> the opportunity of minority voters to elect representatives of their choice.<\/p>\n

Alito says the answer must be yes, because otherwise \u201clitigants can[] circumvent [Rucho<\/em>] by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.\u201d Alito is correct that any partisan gerrymander will automatically produce a racial gap in electoral opportunity if<\/em> race and party are \u201cclosely correlated.\u201d But Congress knew that race and party were \u201cclosely correlated\u201d; that is the very premise<\/em> upon which they legislated \u2013 to grant some measure of political power by race, below which a districting scheme would be called dilutive. Callais<\/em> thus overrides Congress\u2019 goal \u2013 that is, the VRA\u2019s design \u2013 in favor of another principle that the court invented: the right to partisan gerrymandering.<\/p>\n

Imagine applying that same logic in another context. Take the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, another so-called effects test that, like the 1982 VRA amendments, Congress passed to override a Supreme Court decision. Specifically, RFRA says that the federal government may not \u201csubstantially burden\u201d a person\u2019s exercise of religion even via neutral, generally applicable laws unless it demonstrates that the burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling government interest.<\/p>\n

Assume that the federal government passes a rule making people who do not work on Sundays ineligible for Medicaid. Assume that federal courts have held that the government may impose work requirements as a condition of Medicaid. Alito\u2019s logic demands that to establish a RFRA violation we must \u201ccontrol for Sunday work compliance.\u201d After all, the government is free to impose work requirements on any day they choose, just as states are free to gerrymander on the basis of partisanship (by way of non-justiciability). Alito\u2019s rule would hold that there is no RFRA violation if Christians and non-Christians who both refuse to work on Sundays lose Medicaid at equal rates. But that defeats the congressional purpose of RFRA, just as Alito\u2019s alterations to Gingles<\/em> defeat the congressional purpose of the VRA.<\/p>\n

With the VRA, Congress answered the political question that Rucho<\/em> said courts were not equipped to answer: Partisan gerrymandering is \u201ctoo much\u201d when it gives minority voters less opportunity than other voters to elect representatives of their choice. A majority of the Supreme Court evidently did not like that answer. But they are only empowered to reject Congress\u2019 answer if it violates the Constitution. And if the court believes that the VRA as written is unconstitutional, they must say that and defend the position on the merits. Here, the court utterly failed to discharge that duty. Callais<\/em> purports to uphold the VRA while \u2013 at every juncture \u2013 dismantling it.<\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court and social media<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please note that SCOTUS Outside Opinions constitute the views of outside contributors and do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog. Read more The Supreme Court\u2019s drug test Much of the reporting on Louisiana v. 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