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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Five days after the Supreme Court gutted a core provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republican-controlled state legislatures in at least 17 states are quietly drafting new congressional maps that civil rights advocates warn could erase as many as 70 districts currently held or competitive for Black, Hispanic and Native American voters before the 2028 election cycle.

The 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, handed down April 29, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had carved out a second majority-Black district in the wake of the 2020 census, ruling that drawing lines on the basis of race — even when ordered to do so by a federal court enforcing the Voting Rights Act — is itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander unless prosecutors can prove "intentional discrimination" by the state.

What The Court Actually Did

The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, did not formally overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that for six decades has barred any "voting practice or procedure that discriminates on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups." It instead reinterpreted Section 2 to require a showing of intentional discrimination — a much higher legal bar than the "results-based" test that has governed Section 2 cases since the 1982 amendments to the law.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that the majority had "in everything but name buried the Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights statute Congress has ever passed."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, called the ruling "a despicable decision that is a return to Jim Crow, taking decades of hard work for the right to vote and tossing it on the scrap heap." Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, praised the decision as "a long-overdue restoration of the colorblind constitutional principle."

The 17-State Gold Rush

Within hours of the decision, the National Republican Redistricting Trust — the GOP's central redistricting organization — sent out a memo to state party chairs in 17 states identifying districts that the group's lawyers believe are "now redrawable" under the Callais standard. USA Herald reviewed a copy of the memo, which has not previously been reported.

The states named include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. The memo identifies 27 currently Democratic-held congressional seats — a majority of them held by Black Democrats — that the Trust's lawyers believe could be eliminated or rendered uncompetitive through a mid-decade redraw.

Independent redistricting analysts at the Brennan Center for Justice put the potential national impact higher. In a report released Friday, the center estimated that 70 congressional districts nationally — roughly one in six — contain enough racial-bloc voting that they could be challenged or rewritten under the new standard.

Texas Moves First

Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott called a special session of the legislature within 36 hours of the ruling, is expected to be the first state to actually redraw its map. House Speaker Dustin Burrows announced Friday that the chamber would consider a new map drafted by the State Affairs Committee that would consolidate Houston-area districts currently held by Reps. Sylvia Garcia, Sheila Jackson Lee's successor, and Al Green into two seats — eliminating one Democratic-held seat outright and shifting another into a Republican-leaning configuration.

"Texas is the test case," said Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center's Democracy Program. "If Texas can do this in May without a court intervening, then by the end of the summer you will see Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia doing the same. The dam has broken."

Civil Rights Groups Pivot — And Find The Door Closing

Voting rights advocates spent the weekend in emergency strategy meetings. The Legal Defense Fund, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the ACLU Voting Rights Project announced a joint working group Friday to identify the most legally vulnerable redraws and to challenge them as soon as new maps are introduced.

But the post-Callais legal landscape, several attorneys conceded privately, has narrowed dramatically. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — the "preclearance" requirement that historically forced certain Southern states to get federal sign-off before changing voting rules — was effectively neutralized by the Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. Section 2, the workhorse of modern voting rights litigation, has now been narrowed by Callais. What remains, advocates say, is largely the federal Constitution's Equal Protection Clause — a slower, more demanding legal vehicle that requires plaintiffs to prove subjective discriminatory intent.

What This Means For The 2028 Map

Election analysts at the Cook Political Report estimated Friday that the Callais decision could shift the partisan baseline of the U.S. House of Representatives by between 8 and 14 seats in the 2028 elections — enough, in either direction, to determine control of the chamber.

"We have not seen a single court ruling reshape the partisan map of the United States this dramatically since the one-person-one-vote cases of the 1960s," said David Wasserman, the Cook Political Report's House editor. "And those cases moved the country toward more equal representation. This one moves it the other way."

Congress Caught Flat-Footed

On Capitol Hill, Democrats have introduced two emergency response bills: a revival of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — which would explicitly restore the pre-Callais Section 2 standard by statute — and a narrower bill that would create new federal redistricting commissions for states that move to redraw maps mid-decade. Both are considered dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who in 2021 became the first Black senator from his state, delivered an extraordinary 90-minute floor speech Sunday in which he urged colleagues to "find the courage of the men and women who marched at Selma."

"I would not be standing in this chamber today if not for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act," Warnock said. "And if we let this Court write that section out of American law, my children will not see another senator who looks like me from a state that looks like Georgia."

For Voters, The Practical Stakes

For tens of millions of Americans, the most immediate consequence will be felt in the next 18 months as state legislatures begin drawing — and challenging — new maps. The deadlines vary by state, but in roughly half the affected states, new district lines could be in place by the time candidates begin filing for the 2026 midterm primaries this winter. That means some voters will, by the end of the year, be drawn into a new congressional district without ever having voted under the old one.

"The civil rights movement was a 100-year arc that bent toward justice," said Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "What this Court did last week was not a course correction. It was a hard turn back."