The Supreme Court could grant Trump his dream of one-party rule

The Voting Rights Act and its protections for minority voters to elect candidates of their choice are at stake as the court hears arguments in Louisiana v. Callais for the second time in 2025 on Wednesday.

If the court’s conservative supermajority finds Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional (or guts it in a way that makes it nearly useless), they will crush minority political power, particularly black political power, across the country and help Trump pick up many more Republican House seats than he could ever dream of in his mid-decade redistricting effort.

“This is opening up a whole new front from the Republicans’ point of view, where they can dilute black political power and achieve an incredible power grab,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, executive director of Fair Fight Action, a liberal nonprofit that advocates for voting rights.

The case initially came before the court after a group of white Louisianans challenged a map drawn by the Louisiana state legislature, ordered by a lower court to create a second majority-black district under the Voting Rights Act, claiming it discriminated against them.

Instead of ruling on the case, the court called for new discussion on a new issue: whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits electoral practices that lead to “a denial or limitation of the right… to vote” and that leave minority voters with “fewer opportunities… to participate in the political processes and to elect representatives of their choice,” violates the 14th and 15th Amendments by allowing consideration of the Race in redistricting.

Chip Somodevilla via News

When the case first came to court, Louisiana sided with the original black Louisianans who brought the challenge to force the creation of the majority-black 2nd district, arguing that the map should stand. But now the state has turned around. He argues that Section 2 should be repealed as unconstitutional. And for the first time, the Department of Justice joined the case to argue against the Voting Rights Act.

If the law is repealed, it would give Southern states new ability to eliminate black and Latino opportunity districts currently protected by the Voting Rights Act. Southern states with at least one majority-minority district could claim that the court’s ruling orders them to begin redistricting by mid-decade to eliminate these districts now deemed unconstitutional. That could lead to the elimination of up to 19 seats currently held by Democrats, as most majority-Black and Latino districts vote for Democratic candidates, according to a new study from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter. If non-southern states follow Trump’s orders and also redraw district lines, the total number of seats changing hands could rise to 27.

“We could see a case where, by November, we have a decision from this court and we see legislatures across the South calling special sessions like those called this summer with new maps even more aggressive than the one we saw drawn in Texas,” said April England-Albright, national legal director for Black Voters Matter.

The court would need to issue a decision in 2025 if state legislatures hope to redistrict before the candidate voting deadline in 2026, which would give Republicans the opportunity to change a political map that favors Democrats in the midterm elections to one in which the GOP could easily remain in power and block efforts to hold Trump accountable before he leaves. the charge.

If a decision were made in 2026, it would likely be too late for states to redraw their congressional maps, although they could do so before the 2028 elections.

This would usher in a “new Solid South,” Groh-Wargo said, similar to the Solid South of the Jim Crow era, where black voters were excluded from elections and white voters all supported one political party. It would also increase the Republican majority in the House from just five members to 24, making any effort by Democrats to retake the chamber much more difficult.

By doing this, the court could achieve two main goals of the Trump administration: maintaining power by manipulating election laws to ensure that Republicans remain in power, and resegregating American society by rolling back the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.

“There is great potential for this country to be governed by a single party”

– April England Albright, national legal director of Black Voters Matter

Indeed, the arguments presented by Louisiana and white Louisianans in their briefs reflect this when they cite the court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard that ended affirmative action in colleges and universities. They argue that the same race-blind rule should apply to elections as it does to college admissions. That decision is now being weaponized by the Trump administration to force colleges and universities to admit fewer black students.

Republicans also view the creation of a multiracial democracy through the empowerment of minority voters and black voters, in particular, as a threat to the stability of the country and their hold on power, since most non-white voters and almost all black voters vote Democratic.

“For minority voters, this is a very scary time, but I think there are bigger implications beyond what it says for minority people,” England-Albright said. “There is great potential for this country to be governed by a single party.”

The court will most likely gut Section 2. No new facts were discovered in the early arguments of the case that would lead the court to hear new arguments about whether or not Section 2 is unconstitutional. The facts in Louisiana v. Callais are nearly identical to the 2022 case of Allen v. Milligan, where the court ruled 5-4 that Section 2 required Alabama to draw a majority-black second district.

But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the majority in that case, wrote a concurrence arguing that “the authority to conduct redistricting based on race cannot be extended indefinitely into the future.” He noted that this “temporary” argument was not raised and therefore he would not rule on it… yet.

During the first round of arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, Kavanaugh seemed obsessed with the temporal argument. Now that the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act is before the court, he can turn it around and join the four other conservatives in ending its application to redistricting.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in Allen v. Milligan, could change too. As a lawyer in Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led opposition to the 1982 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, which required courts to consider whether district maps had racially discriminatory results and were not simply the product of intentional racial discrimination. This change freed the courts to require minority opportunity districts to be drawn more easily and spurred the creation of all majority-black seats in the South, including the Louisiana seat now before the court.

Roberts also wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which freed states with a history of discrimination from having to preclear voting and redistricting with the Justice Department for racially discriminatory practices. His decision in that case was based on the same temporal argument that Kavanaugh now makes in Louisiana v. Callais.

“I don’t know how you can come to a narrow opinion from this,” said Wilfred Codrington III, a constitutional law professor at Cardozo Law School, predicting that the court would issue a ruling with far-reaching consequences.

Even the seemingly narrowest path offered by the Justice Department in its brief to the court would effectively nullify Section 2. While not calling for Section 2 to be completely repealed as Louisiana and white Louisianans do, Attorney General D. John Sauer’s brief appeals to the court make it more difficult for minority groups to bring a Section 2 case by requiring courts to preserve the partisan balance of the maps. existing ones, basically forcing even a majority black seat to be somehow enticed to elect a Republican, while destroying the extension of the law contained in the 1982 amendment to cover racially discriminatory effects. This amounts to “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” according to Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos.

Samuel Corum via Getty Images

“To a large extent, this would either make the test quite difficult to apply or basically void the entire Section 2 as an amended test and return us to a place before the 1982 amendment,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

This would devastate black representation in Congress as well as in state legislatures, city councils, and other local government bodies throughout the South and across the country. Given that black voters almost universally elect Democrats, this would have an intense partisan effect and create a Republican supermajority, or universal control over large swathes of the country, similar to the Democratic regime, then the Southern Party, created through Jim Crow.

In many ways, this reminds us of one of the darkest chapters in American history. After the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Supreme Court set about eviscerating their intent in a series of cases that led to the evisceration of black civil rights and political power throughout the South and the imposition of Jim Crow. The language of those cases of the century o XIX is reflected in the arguments presented today in Louisiana v. You shut up, like the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild argue in a brief in the case.

Your brief compare an argument advanced by white Louisianans against the creation of the second black majority seat in the majority decision in the infamous Civil Rights Cases of 1883. This decision found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, since the 14th Amendment did not allow the federal government to prohibit private racial discrimination.

“As the record reveals, Section 2 is abused to establish racial quotas and elevate some groups over others,” white Louisianans argued in a brief in early 2025.

“When a man has emerged from slavery and by the aid of beneficent legislation has freed himself from the inseparable commitments of that state, there must be some stage in the process of his elevation in which he assumes the rank of a simple citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws,” wrote Justice Joseph Bradley in the Civil Rights Cases decision.

This “feeling” that “blacks in America have come far enough” is identical, the brief maintains.

Its effects would also be the same. When Civil Rights and other cases, including the decision of separate but equal in Plessy vs. Fergusonled to the imposition of Jim Crow authoritarianism and the elimination of all black representation from the South, just as the destruction of Section 2 would lead to an all-out assault on current black representation. It would set back what is today the most diverse Congress in the history of the country. And in doing so, the court would give Republicans up to 19 House seats to bolster their majority and protect Trump from facing oversight and accountability.

“The question before us is: are we going to have a multiracial democracy?” Codrington said. “We have a multiracial country. Are we just going to be a multiracial country or are we also going to live in a country where we think that racial minorities will have some power and will not be persistent political minorities?”