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Following a Supreme Court ruling last week that upended enforcement mechanisms of the Voting Rights Act, President Donald Trump called on Republican states throughout the country to use the occasion to gerrymander their maps for political reasons.
The missive from Trump, posted on Truth Social on Monday, incorrectly implied that states had to change their maps following the court’s ruling.
“We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures,” Trump insisted.
Recognizing that his demand may result in states having to delay primary elections (as is the case in Louisiana), Trump said, “If they have to vote twice, so be it.”
Trump was not shy about why he was making his call for immediate map changes: helping Republicans in this fall’s elections. Current polling shows the party trailing Democrats, and some models show Dems ahead by as many as 15 seats.
“The byproduct is that the Republicans will receive more than 20 House Seats in the upcoming Midterms!” Trump wrote.
Many legal scholars have panned the Supreme Court ruling, which found Louisiana was improperly directed by lower courts to draw an additional Black-majority district to comply with aspects of the Voting Rights Act. Overturning that method of enforcing the VRA, dissenting Justice Elena Kagan said, was just the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
Shortly after the ruling, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) declared an “emergency” in his state, ordering the delay of primary elections in order for Republican lawmakers in the state legislature to redraw congressional boundaries. Other states, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, may soon take the same action, a move that is “aimed at wiping out Black political power” in those states, an analysis from Democracy Docket said.
Although the Supreme Court said that the VRA couldn’t be used to tell states to draw Black-majority districts, the conservative-majority ruling did not immediately order states to redraw their maps. Rather, the ruling suggests that states are now empowered to redraw their maps without that consideration.
The court took additional (and unusual) action on Monday, voting to expedite enforcement of its ruling, a move that has only occurred twice in the past 25 years, and which allows Louisiana (and other states) to redistrict now, with the new ruling in mind, if they want to. Typically, enforcement actions by the court happen more than a month after a ruling is made.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter against the move. In a statement decrying the action, she said it had a “strong political undercurrent” that was “tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.”
Louisiana’s hurried response to the Callais decision unfolds in the midst of an ongoing statewide election, against the backdrop of a pitched redistricting battle among state governments that appear to be acting as proxies for their favored political parties. As always, the court has a choice… To avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures. But today, the court chooses the opposite. Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation.
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