The Court’s Ruling Unleashed a Torrent of Race-Based Pro-White Gerrymandering

The Republican Supreme Court justices’ ruling to end what the right calls race-based gerrymandering has immediately resulted in a spate of race-based gerrymandering. Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and probably Mississippi and South Carolina as well are all creating elongated and weirdly shaped race-based districts that break up clusters of Black residents so that white residents can constitute a majority. Out of all the 50 states, these five are the ones where the lines of race most neatly overlap the lines of partisan affiliation.

Nothing even remotely like a gerrymander was required to carve the districts that centered on these states’ major cities. Tennessee’s Memphis district, Louisiana’s New Orleans district, and Alabama’s Birmingham district were compact; they deviated from the Court’s diktat banning race-based districts not because they were gerrymandered but because they were majority-Black. Breaking them up into slices of the city linked to slices of the suburbs and the countryside, however, does indeed require race-based gerrymandering, which the Republican justices understood very well. We can debate whether they simply prefer whites over Blacks; what’s beyond debate is that they prefer Republicans over Democrats.

That was evident when John Roberts, then in private practice, worked for the Republican effort to claim a victory in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. It was evident when Roberts, then working in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, argued that the administration should work to weaken the Voting Rights Act, then up for renewal. And that was evident when Roberts’s mentor, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, when in private practice in the early 1960s, challenged Black voters at the polls in Phoenix, asking them to produce credentials or to state what portions of the Constitution said. (During congressional confirmation hearings for Rehnquist decades later, witnesses, most prominently San Francisco attorney James Brosnahan, testified to Rehnquist’s attempts to stop Blacks from voting.)

WHILE THE COURT HAS NOW SANCTIFIED an ongoing orgy of partisan redistricting, that orgy was already well under way, ever since President Trump demanded that Texas create five new Republican districts. Partisan gerrymandering has been with us for centuries, but it’s only in the past few decades that computers have enabled legislators to redistrict with enough mathematical exactitude that they can be fairly assured of the electoral outcomes. (Of course, the mathematical exactitude doesn’t extend to the performance of the pols and parties that benefit from the redistricting; as Trump is currently illustrating, the malignant buffoonery of a president can eclipse many a gerrymander-created bounce.)

But in our current political climate, which in many ways resembles that of the late 1850s, when a civil war loomed as an “irrepressible conflict,” in the words of New York Sen. William Seward, the depth and scope of our current conflict (which I don’t think will plunge us into civil war, but into everything short of that) guarantees that states where one party controls both the legislature and the governor’s office will go in for ultra-partisan gerrymandering at every conceivable moment, not restricting themselves to post-census decennial line-drawing.

The only alternative to that parlous state—and one that would be a great deal more fair to Democrats in red states and Republicans in blue ones—would be to switch to a Congress based on proportional representation. In California, where the partisan vote count in statewide elections is almost invariably 65 percent to Democratic candidates and 35 percent to Republicans, the party alignment of the state’s 52 House members would be apportioned in accordance with the aggregate statewide vote. So, too, in Texas, where Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024 by a 56 percent to 42 percent margin: If the partisan split in a particular election conducted under proportional representation had that same split, that split would be reflected in the state’s congressional delegation. (Since these are hypothetical illustrations, I’ve chosen to ignore the question of whether the representation should be calculated based on statewide votes or nationwide votes. I’m also not herein considering whether under such a system, our two major parties would splinter into smaller parties that would also win the kind of representation they can’t get in our winner-take-all electoral system, though that would almost surely be one of the consequences of this shift, as my colleague David Dayen noted when he made the case for proportional representation last year.)

But one thing should be clear: In a nation beset with an irrepressible conflict, partisan gerrymandering will be the norm. If you don’t want America to go down that path, proportional representation is really the only exit ramp.