Racial Gerrymandering

Gavin Newsom, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Elliot Pritzker claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais allows states to racially gerrymander their legislative districts.

IN FACT, the decision does the exact opposite and explicitly bans racial gerrymandering. For more than 150 years, Democrats have engaged in racial discrimination while denying it and accusing others of their own actions. Here are the specifics:

Less than a year after the Civil War ended in 1865, the Louisiana Democratic Party passed a resolution stating that “people of African descent cannot be considered” citizens, and “we hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of” whites.
In the same era, the Ku Klux Klan was founded, reorganized under the leadership of prominent Democrats, and effectively became a “terrorist arm of the Democratic Party” that murdered and intimidated black and white Republicans, as Democrat politicians and “Democratic newspapers printed blanket denials of the existence of the Klan.”
Per the academic book White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, “Klansmen repeatedly attacked Negroes for no other stated offense than voting, or intending to vote, the Republican ticket. Their repeated admonition was to either vote the Democratic ticket or stay at home.”
In response to those and similar actions by white Southern Democrats, a bloc of Congressmen called the Radical Republicans passed 4 federal civil rights laws and the 14th and 15th Constitutional Amendments, which require “equal protection of the laws” and the “right” to “vote” regardless of “race” or “color.”
To enforce those laws, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops into the South, and 16 African Americans became members of the U.S. Congress while 600 were elected to state legislatures.
In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court flouted the plain words of the 14th Amendment and the legislative record of its enactment to rule (5–4) in the case of United States v. Cruikshank that neither the 14th Amendment, nor any other part of the Constitution, requires states to honor the Bill of Rights.
That ruling unleashed white militias and mobs to subjugate black people through violence and intimidation. Because states were not forced to treat people equally under the law, many governments looked the other way and facilitated plots to lynch more than 1,200 black people and otherwise oppress them. Republicans tried to pass federal anti-lynching laws to stop this but were thwarted by Democrats.
After federal troops left the South, Southern Democrats implemented measures that “virtually eliminated” black people from voting. These included but weren’t limited to primary elections that explicitly banned non-whites from participating, poll taxes that destitute former slaves couldn’t afford to pay, and literacy tests that most former slaves couldn’t pass due to laws that had banned teaching slaves to read.
In 1901, George White of North Carolina left the U.S. House of Representatives. He was the last black member of Congress from the South until 1973.
Immediately after World War II, the Democrat Party started losing Congressional seats due to their hostility to civil rights, and Northern Democrats joined with Republicans in trying to pass civil rights laws, but Southern Democrats watered down and blocked them.
In 1964, the U.S. Constitution was amended to abolish poll taxes for all federal elections and to ensure that no one could be excluded from federal primary elections on account of race.
That same year, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 with 65% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans voting for it. Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law.
In the next year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to “enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution” by barring governments from denying the “right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”
From 1958 to 1999, the portion of white Southerners who said they would be willing to vote for a black president increased from 8% to 95%, and Southern whites began switching en masse to the Republican Party.
Despite the strong inverse association between declining racism and Republican gains in the South, certain Democrats, journalists, and scholars alleged that Southern whites switched parties because Republicans engaged in a “Southern Strategy” of courting racism.
In reality, the main demographic of Southerners who supported segregation continued to vote for Democrats at about the same rate, 20 of the 21 Democrats who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stayed in the Democratic Party, and the shift of Southern voters to the Republican Party correlated with massive declines in racism, growing prosperity, Democrats’ opposition to gun rights, and Democrats’ support of abortion up to birth for effectively any reason.
While those changes were underway, Democrats shifted from supporting anti-black discrimination to anti-white discrimination with the stated aim of ensuring equal outcomes for people of different races.
In 1975, a Democrat Congressmen representing a district with a large black population attempted to join the Congressional Black Caucus, and he was denied admission because he was white.
In 1980, a plurality of the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Mobile v. Bolden that the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act don’t require governments to draw legislative districts to create “proportional representation” for voters of different races. Instead, they prohibit governments from engaging in “purposefully discriminatory” actions that infringe the “freedom to vote.”
In response to the 1980 ruling, Congress passed and Republican President Ronald Reagan signed a law in 1982 that prohibits governments from giving minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process,” providing that “nothing” in the law “establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.”
Over the ensuing decades, Democrat politicians and judges used that law to racially gerrymander while amplifying and distorting rare tragedies to accuse large swaths of Americans of racism.
In a 2022 racial gerrymandering case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Joe Biden while explicitly excluding everyone who wasn’t a “black woman” — claimed that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment authorized government to make people “equal” by taking “race-conscious” actions.
In reality, the Constitution’s 14th Amendment forbids government from denying “any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When Republican Jacob Howard introduced the amendment in the U.S. Senate, he explained that it “does away with the injustice of subjecting one caste of persons to a code not applicable to another.”
In 2022, an Obama-appointed federal judge ruled that Louisiana’s U.S. Congressional map violated the 1982 law because only one of its 6 Congressional districts were “majority-black.” Thus, she ordered the state to create a new map with 2 “majority-black” districts.
This week, the Supreme Court ruled (6–3) that Louisiana’s new map is an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
The justices in the majority, all appointed by Republicans, argue that the Voting Rights Act and Constitution prohibit states from “intentionally” drawing its maps to “afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”
The justices in the minority, all appointed by Democrats, argue that this ruling will allow states to prevent “Black (but not White) voters from having an opportunity to elect their preferred representative.”
In reality, black voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats, white voters slightly favor Republicans, and Democrat gerrymanders in states like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Virginia deny the vast bulk of Republicans of an opportunity to elect their preferred representative.

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