SCOTUS Redistricting Decision Just Ended Affirmative Action — for House Democrats

Here’s a point to ponder: Despite being 31-33 percent Republican, New Hampshire has no GOP congressman. What would a Republican congressional district look like were the state forced to create one?

Then, imagine Massachusetts had to forge a district for its gun owners, who comprise just 14.7 percent of the state’s population. Would it or the New Hampshire district look anything like this?

We don’t know, and the above isn’t either one. What it is, as indicated, is the 2024 Louisiana district map highlighting two court-ordered black-majority districts. Yes, they look like tortuous areas created by tortuous people. One of them will now be history, though, after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on April 29.

The ruling essentially holds that under the Voting Rights Act (VRA), states may not draw districts based mainly on race. It finally ends a 60-year judicial fantasy that, in ordering such race-based outcomes, completely distorted the VRA’s intent.

Democrats’ Affirmative Action

Let’s be clear, too, on what was in essence being said by the racial bean counters. “We’re not going to create special districts for Republicans, gun owners, libertarians, fishermen, enlarged-prostate sufferers, or any other ‘underrepresented’ group. But we are going to create them for blacks and Hispanics — even if they look like a horizontal lightning strike.”

“Oh, purely coincidentally, almost all these districts will just so happen to vote Democrat.”

And, boy, do they ever. As Doug Truax, founder and CEO of Restoration of America, writes at RealClearPolitics, the racial sleight-of-hand resulted in “144 majority-minority districts, just 23 of which elected Republicans in 2024.”

“Call it what it is,” he states: “affirmative action for Democratic members of Congress.”

But those days are over. As Truax also informs:

Callais now frees red state Republicans to redraw as many as 36 majority-minority districts held by Democrats — transforming once-safe blue seats into battlegrounds. Democrats are still reeling from a gut punch delivered just days earlier, when SCOTUS reinstated Texas’ new congressional map ahead of the November midterms. They have every reason to panic.

Credit President [Donald] Trump and Texas Republicans for thinking outside the box. Last summer, Trump touched off a redistricting revolution transforming 13 Democratic seats into likely GOP gains in Texas (5), Florida (4), Ohio (2), North Carolina (1), and Missouri (1). The Callais decision is likely to lead to 5-6 more this cycle: Louisiana (2), Alabama (1-2), Tennessee (1), and South Carolina (1).

In response, Democrats spent some $200 million on gerrymandering ballot measures in California and Virginia — designed to sideline the very independent redistricting commissions they once hailed as the cure for gerrymandering. Although California reaped benefits for Democrats, it galvanized Republicans. And with the Virginia state supreme court on Friday striking down the Democrats’ tortured gerrymander, Republicans are left with a probable net gain of more than a dozen house [sic] seats.

This is, of course, what’s really upsetting Democrats. Sure, they may claim Callais represents the “swiftest disenfranchisement of black folks since Reconstruction.” They may claim it’s Jim Crow 2.0. These are, however, merely the protestations (and kabuki theater) of politicians who’ve come to take preferential treatment for granted. Consequently, a level playing field seems to them like discrimination.

And their warnings certainly aren’t anything to trouble over. After all, as late black professor Walter E. Williams emphasized in 2018, “Black political power means zilch.” His point: While black political clout surged between 1970 and 2012, black economic and social advancement didn’t.

So what’s the correct way to conceptualize the Callais effect? Courts had for 60 years partially usurped southern Republican states’ gerrymandering power. They generally used it to benefit Democrats, too. Now these states get to make their own gerrymandering decisions — just as the Democrat-run states have always done.

Democrats Are Barking ’Cause They Can’t Bite?

And gerrymander the Democrats did — in spades. Truax notes that the party can’t mirror the new GOP gerrymandering because left-wing states are maxed out. Recent gerrymandering pushes in Maryland, New York, and Colorado failed. Massachusetts and Wisconsin could perhaps at this point only gerrymander fellow Democrats from power.

Truax also makes some other points:

• Conservative states are projected to gain approximately 10 House seats (and Electoral College votes) after the 2030 census. Reason: the continuing blue-to-red migration trend.
• A major Republican advantage lies ahead. The aforementioned factors could create 250- to 270-seat House majorities and lasting GOP dominance, even if Trump loses key Rust Belt states.
• Call to action — conservatives must build voter infrastructure now to seize the moment and secure long-term majorities.

(Of course, this presupposes the Democrats don’t win Congress and the presidency the next two election cycles. For they would then use such power to rig the system by hook or by crook.)

By the way, another complaint heard following Callais is that the GOP needs to “cheat” to win. In reality, though, neutral, compact, nonpartisan districting would favor Republicans, giving them a three-to-15-seat structural edge. This is because Democrats are concentrated in dense urban areas, creating “natural packing” that wastes leftist votes in landslide districts. Republicans are more evenly distributed in suburbs and rural areas.

Put simply, eliminating all gerrymandering would apparently favor Republicans. This again underlines how malevolent the courts’ 60-year Voting Rights Act judicial activism was. It wasn’t bad enough the GOP was disadvantaged, relatively speaking, by the gerrymandering norm. It also then had judges putting their thumbs on the scale and gerrymandering the party’s own Republican states to elect Democrats.

And this may help explain how the Democrats became so incompetent. After all, incompetence is exactly what affirmative action breeds.