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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.