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In the fog of the redistricting wars to come, it may be easy to remember the audacity of President Trump demanding state legislatures immediately redraw maximally rigged maps. But this didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the next logical step in decades-long sequence of events that have led, rather predictably, to this moment.

In 2021, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brnovich v. DNC deeply eroded the Voting Rights Act, I wrote with FairVote’s David Daley that “a central goal of conservative jurisprudence is the carving back of federal protections, and the empowerment of states over vast swaths of social and civil life.” We warned that Chief Justice John Roberts had been “patiently preparing to dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act for 40 years,” and that “his careful long game may end in checkmate for majority rule as we know it.”

That checkmate has arrived. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court’s 6-3 ruling gutted Section 2 — the last enforceable provision of the Voting Rights Act — by requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional racial discrimination while allowing partisan gerrymandering as a defense. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, the “decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”

The immediate headlines focused on Congress: the potential loss of as many as 19 House seats held by Democrats, including as much as 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus. These consequences are grave. But an equally consequential and far less discussed impact is what Callais means for state legislatures — the overlooked institutions that have quietly been growing in power over the past few decades, and that now hold more of it than ever, with even fewer guardrails.

The Venue Is the Strategy

The conservative strategy for consolidating state-level power has never been a secret. In March 2010, Karl Rove........

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