On April 29, the Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais. The vote was 6-3 along ideological lines. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority.
The ruling struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander — and rewrote the rules for how every state in the country can draw its districts. Under the new standard, a Section 2 Voting Rights Act claim requires proving intentional racial discrimination, not just a statistical disparity in outcomes. That’s a different bar than what federal courts have been applying for decades. Republican-controlled legislatures from South Carolina to Tennessee started reading the implications before the opinion was cold.
Start with South Carolina.
The state has seven congressional seats: six Republican, one Democrat. The Democrat is Jim Clyburn, 85 years old and running for his 18th term. Clyburn has represented South Carolina’s 6th District since 1992, when the map was redrawn specifically to create a majority-minority seat. Republicans in the state legislature are now pursuing a full 7-0 sweep. President Trump has publicly encouraged the effort. State House GOP leaders have already launched proceedings to add redistricting to the legislative calendar before the regular session ends May 14.
South Carolina is one of eight southern states where seats are now in play. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced this week he intends to redraw his state’s maps to capture an additional Republican seat — Tennessee currently sends eight Republicans and one Democrat to Washington. Alabama is moving as well. Analysts tracking the full scope of the decision have identified 12 congressional districts across those eight states where Republicans can now pursue redraws. The estimated total gain if all of them proceed: as many as 19 additional Republican House seats.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a potential realignment of the House majority.
The Court’s logic is worth understanding, because the next several months will bring a sustained argument that this ruling ends voting rights as we know it. What it actually ended is this: the use of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as a mandate to draw majority-minority districts regardless of whether intentional discrimination was the cause. Alito’s majority found that Louisiana’s Sixth District — designed to connect Black communities across the state — was itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fifteenth Amendment. You cannot, the Court concluded, remedy one racial classification with another.
Before accepting the argument that this ruling is an assault on fairness, it is worth reviewing what “fair” has looked like in states where Democrats draw the maps.
In 2022, New York Democrats produced a congressional map that New York’s own Court of Appeals struck down. The judges found the map was “drawn to discourage competition and favor Democrats” — a direct violation of the state constitution’s anti-gerrymandering reforms that New York voters had passed themselves in 2014. No national press conference followed. No primetime panels about threats to democracy.
Illinois has produced congressional maps so one-sided that the state’s delegation bears no relationship to its statewide election results, where competitive races for governor and senator are routine. No congressional hearings. No statements from organizations that claim to protect the integrity of elections.
If you do a CTRL-F search for a Democratic National Committee statement criticizing a Democratic legislature’s congressional maps, you will find zero results.
What Callais removes is the federal mechanism that allowed states to justify racial gerrymandering as Voting Rights compliance. What it does not do is prevent any voter from casting a ballot. Jim Clyburn will still appear on the ballot in South Carolina. Whether his district survives a redraw is a question for the legislature — the same legislature South Carolina voters elected.
The lawsuits are already being drafted. Several civil rights organizations announced plans within 24 hours to challenge any redraws in court. The Supreme Court refused to stay its own decision, meaning redraws can proceed while litigation works through the system. That process could take years.
The practical question is speed. South Carolina’s legislative session ends May 14. If Republicans add redistricting to the agenda before that deadline, a new map could be in place for November. If they miss the window, the fight moves to 2028.
Nineteen seats would represent the largest Republican House majority in decades. The clock is running.
