The U.S. Supreme Court's Wednesday decision undermining the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act could have significant ramifications for Texas.
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, involved the state's creation of a congressional district that would serve as the state's second opportunity seat for African American voters. By a 6-to-3 decision, the high court ruled this constituted an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander."
Writing for the court's conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito said Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision that allowed enforcement of the act — didn't bar states from using non-racial factors when drawing maps, including to achieve partisan advantage.
"In short," Alito wrote, "Section 2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race. Not only does this interpretation follow from the plain text of Section 2, but it is consistent with the limited authority that the Fifteenth Amendment confers."
Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, said the ruling "renders section 2 all but a dead letter."
Valencia Richardson, senior legal counsel for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, used a different analogy.
"I think it’s safe to say that the Callais decision has just run a truck through Section 2 when it comes to vote dilution claims," Richardson said. "The folks brought this case in the hopes of destroying what was left of the Voting Rights Act. And what they’ve done has dealt a fundamental blow to the achievement of our multiracial democracy."
The Callais ruling makes it much harder to obtain any redress of racial discrimination in redistricting through the courts.
"You would have to show a smoking gun of intentional discrimination. Something as egregious as legislators saying, ‘I hate Black voters,' [or] something as egregious as, like, ‘I don’t want Latino voters in my district,'” said Sarah Chen, senior supervising attorney for voting rights at the Texas Civil Rights Project. "And even that might not be enough given how the other ways that the Supreme Court is trying to completely alter the Voting Rights Act beyond recognition."
While Alito claimed the ruling allowed Section 2 to stand, in modified form, David Froomkin, a constitutional law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, argued the decision effectively overturned 40 years of jurisprudence on voting rights.
"I think it’s hard to overstate how seismic this change is going to be," Froomkin said. "I expect that states across the South will respond by eliminating minority opportunity congressional districts — for example, Louisiana, the subject of this particular case, but also states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas."
Before the end of the day Wednesday, Florida lawmakers approved a new congressional map aimed at flipping four Democratic House seats to the Republican column.
The Callais decision comes just two days after the high court upheld Texas' latest congressional redistricting plan. Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu (D-Houston) was at the forefront of efforts to try to avert that redistricting, including leading a multi-week quorum break last year during the special sessions called to pass redistricting.
"In December, I said the Supreme Court's stay of our injunction against Texas' racially-gerrymandered maps was a harbinger of the end of the Voting Rights Act," Wu said. "Today, the Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court made it official. They gutted the most important civil rights law of the last century, and they handed Republican legislatures across the country a permission slip to follow Texas' lead — cracking and packing Black and Latino voters into districts where their voices won't matter."
The Callais decision applies not only to redrawing congressional maps but also state legislative districts, as well as county and city government precincts. Republican state lawmakers have already signaled they plan to redraw the state's political boundaries again as a result of the decision.
"We all wasted a lot of money and time fighting a completely unnecessary redistricting in 2025," Chen said. "Texas taxpayers are going to have to do the same just so that people in power can squeeze out more power, either later this year or in 2027, and then they’re going to have to again in 2031."
Congressman Christian Menefee (D-Houston) — who represents TX-18, the state's most historic African-American opportunity congressional district — said the decision underscores the importance of passing legislation to strengthen voting rights.
"This fight is far from over," Menefee said. "We will not allow this decision to erase the hard-won gains communities of color have made. We will continue to push back against efforts to silence voters, challenge discriminatory maps, and demand a democracy that reflects all of us."
Congressman Al Green (D-Houston) — who currently represents TX-9 but is in a primary runoff against Menefee in TX-18, having been moved out of TX-9 in last year’s congressional redistricting — issued his own statement condemning the high court’s ruling.
“If we are indeed being forced to revisit the struggles of the 1960s,” Green said, “then we must be prepared to meet this moment with the same resolve those struggles required. Protestation is not only appropriate, it is essential. Peaceful protest has always been a cornerstone of progress in this country, and it remains one of the most powerful tools the American people have to demand justice and accountability.”
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