After months of anticipation, the Supreme Court finally handed down its decision in the voting-rights case Louisiana v. Callais on Wednesday. In a 6-3 opinion along ideological lines, the Court ruled that a majority-minority Louisiana House district, which was created after a federal judge ruled that the state had run afoul of the Voting Rights Act, violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito severely weakened Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices, by forcing plaintiffs in the future to prove that lawmakers intentionally discriminated by race in drawing maps — a far tougher standard than before. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a scathing dissent that the majority had rendered Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” It was the latest in a string of body blows to the Voting Rights Act inflicted by the Roberts-era Court over more than a decade. Democrats fear that the decision could have seismic effects by erasing the majority-minority districts that dot the South — potentially giving Republicans an enduring advantage in the House.

Sean Trende, a senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, is a keen political observer who also has personal experience with the complexity of redistricting: He helped draw Virginia’s congressional maps after the 2020 census. (Voters recently overrode those maps as part of this year’s gerrymandering wars.) I spoke with Trende about the reasoning behind the Supreme Court’s big decision, how bad the consequences might be for Democrats, and how they might combat those effects.

At first blush, the Supreme Court didn’t destroy Section 2 of the Voting Rights Acts Way the way some were expecting. But it seemed like the more experts delved into the decision, the more they concluded that the justices in the majority did demolish Section 2, just in a roundabout way. Do you agree?I think people are minimizing the importance of it not being struck down, and they shouldn’t, because the limits on intentional discrimination really are intact. And I do think that’s important and we shouldn’t lose sight of it. It certainly becomes much harder to go beyond that, and I understand why people are upset, but there really is an important distinction between this and saying, “Okay, you can intentionally discriminate.”

The Louisiana district at the center of this case will be redrawn. But the question on many people’s minds is how this affects the midterms. There’s a lot of noise from Republicans, especially in southern states, about calling special sessions and........

© Daily Intelligencer