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Last week, the Supreme Court issued one of its most damaging decisions in decades, essentially ending the protections of the Voting Rights Act, in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision means that Republican state legislators in the South will now be able to eliminate districts drawn to grant Black citizens some form of representation in Congress, and replace them with districts dominated by white voters, dismantling one of the great achievements of the Civil Rights era. The court has blessed this move, so long as these state legislators call their racial gerrymanders “partisan” instead. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have already begun plans to redraw maps to eliminate majority-Black voting districts. Nationally, Republicans stand to gain large numbers of new seats by 2028 and beyond, when states are expected to kick the redistricting wars into high gear while wiping out minority representation in Congress.

But what about the Democrats? Memes have gone around social media showing blue states like California gerrymandering every one of their districts to oust every single Republican in response to Callais. This may be the fantasy of some Democrats, but the truth is, it’s far easier to draw one of these maps than to actually implement it, given the collateral damage Democrats would have to inflict on their own minority voters.

Ultimately, the Callais decision is only going to amp up the redistricting wars that were already begun by President Donald Trump, who kicked things off last year by demanding that Republican-controlled states find ways to blunt the blue wave expected in the 2026 midterms, starting with Texas.

Another core issue that the mass redistricting movement ignores is the deep loss that American voters will suffer, particularly voters of color. Minority groups tend to vote Democrat, particularly Black voters, who have proved time and time again how integral they are for Democratic electoral success. But as the Democratic Party tries to keep up with Republicans’ partisan redistricting efforts, it may very well have to dilute majority-minority districts in order to expand and secure more congressional seats. When asked about this dilemma, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries demurred, insisting that Democrats will “ensure that communities of color will continue to have the chance to elect the candidate of their choice in districts that have traditionally been covered by the Voting Rights Act,” but added in the same breath, “while at the same time doing what is necessary, as occurred in California, to decisively respond to efforts by Republicans to gerrymander congressional maps.”

No matter what path Democrats take, something’s gotta give. In order to make sense of the stakes involved in Republicans’ and Democrats’ redistricting push, I spoke with Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. Karlan previously served under the Obama administration’s Justice Department, and back in 1991 argued Chisom v. Roemer before the Supreme Court, a case that successfully argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act also applies to judicial elections.

Here’s our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Shirin Ali: What do you see as the immediate consequences of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision? 

Pamela Karlan: We moved from a world in which the voters pick their representatives to one in which the representatives are now picking the voters. It’s a kind of an endless-war, race-to-the- bottom type of world in which each move produces some kind of countermove. We’re obviously getting very far away from the idea that elections should be designed to be fair. The Supreme Court, in Callais, in the space of 40 years, has moved from the view that political gerrymandering is unconstitutional to the view that it’s unconstitutional but we can’t do anything about it, to the idea that naked political gerrymandering is somehow a legitimate government interest that overrides interests in ensuring that all voters have an equal opportunity to elect........

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