Jim Crow returns: the maps were ready
The Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act on April 29. By nightfall, Florida had a new congressional map. Mississippi had scheduled its special session before the opinion was written. The racism wasn't created by Callais—it was waiting for permission.
On April 29, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. As we noted at the time, the decision gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—permitting states to use partisan gerrymandering as cover to dilute Black voting power without legal consequence.
The ink wasn't dry before the South got to work.
They weren't waiting
Before the ruling even landed, Mississippi's governor had already blocked off his calendar. He declared that a special legislative session on redistricting would begin exactly 21 days after any ruling in Callais. He didn't know what the Court would decide. He knew what he would do when it did.
In Florida, during a special legislative session held in the hours immediately following the ruling, the legislature passed a new congressional map. The governor signed it into law ahead of the 2026 elections. Not days later. Hours.
In Tennessee, the legislature proposed and passed a new congressional map that carves up the city of Memphis into three districts. This eliminates the only majority-Black district in the old map by spreading Democratic voters into rural Republican districts stretching hundreds of miles east.
In Alabama, the story is more tangled and more revealing. After the Supreme Court lifted a prior injunction and remanded Alabama's long-running redistricting case in light of Callais, Governor Ivey called a special primary election for four of the state's seven congressional districts under a 2023 gerrymander that courts had already found to be intentionally racially discriminatory—threatening ballots already cast under the prior map. The state tried to use Callais as a retroactive permission slip for a map that was already on the record as a civil rights violation.
This is not a response to a ruling. This is a response to a starting gun. The racism was not created by Callais.
It was waiting for permission.
The cover
The legal language deployed in these efforts is the language of partisan politics, not race. That's the point. The Court rewrote key protections of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that goals such as partisan gerrymandering and incumbent protection can now justify drawing election maps that dampen minority voters' political power.
If you can call it partisanship, you can do it. The fig leaf is the feature.
This is an old technique in new paperwork. The Redeemer legislatures that dismantled Reconstruction didn't announce that their purpose was racial subordination either. They passed literacy tests. They required poll taxes. They drew lines. The stated rationale was always something else—fiscal responsibility, electoral integrity, community cohesion.
The effect was always the same.
Until Callais, the Voting Rights Act's antidiscrimination protections partly served as a constraint on states seeking untrammeled partisan advantage in drawing election maps. No longer. The Roberts Court didn't invent this project in April. It's been building the scaffold for twenty years.
The Court's long project
Shelby County v. Holder (2013) gutted the preclearance requirement. This was the provision that required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the coverage formula was based on outdated data. Within hours of that ruling, Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had previously been blocked.
Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) narrowed the remaining enforcement mechanisms under Section 2, making it substantially harder to challenge laws that disproportionately burden minority voters.
Callais finished the job. Moving forward, any legal constraints on gerrymandering will come from state law, barring new action by Congress. These could include state constitutional limits on partisan gerrymandering, along with other state requirements. But we are unlikely to see many judicial limits in the first wave of post-Callais gerrymanders.
The federal floor is gone. What remains is a patchwork of state courts, some of which have already shifted sharply rightward. In Florida, the state constitution prohibits drawing districts to favor incumbents or political parties, and the Florida Supreme Court previously enforced that provision to block gerrymandered maps.
But the court's composition has shifted sharply to the right since its earlier ruling, leaving it unclear what force these limits will have today.
May 26
We found out this week.
On May 26, the judge in the consolidated Florida lawsuits refused to grant a temporary injunction, allowing the state's new congressional map to remain in place.
The same day, a panel of three judges dismissed the Tennessee state court challenge, finding the legislature had the authority to engage in mid-decade redistricting.
Two states. Same day. Both maps standing.
The Tennessee dismissal is worth examining. The NAACP had argued that because the governor's special session proclamation didn't specifically identify the mid-decade redistricting ban as something to be addressed, the legislature lacked the authority to overturn it and pass the new map. A procedural argument, yes, but a legitimate one, rooted in the state's own constitution. The court dismissed it anyway.
Alabama, for the moment, is a partial exception. A federal three-judge panel blocked Alabama's 2023 map on May 26, ruling it was "tainted by intentional race-based discrimination" and explicitly rejected the state's attempt to use Callais as cover: "Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found." Alabama filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court within 24 hours. The permission slip is now back in front of the people who wrote it.
This is what the post-Callais landscape looks like in practice. The federal floor is gone. The state courts are declining to hold. The maps are in place for November.
What's actually happening
The numbers speak for themselves. Over 1.7 million Black voters reside in Florida. Over 1.2 million Black people reside in Tennessee. Over 1.3 million in Alabama. Over 1.4 million in Louisiana. Over 1.1 million in Mississippi.
These are not abstractions. These are voters whose representation is being deliberately engineered away, in real time, ahead of a midterm election.
Several GOP-controlled southern states have responded swiftly to Callais with efforts to draw more extreme gerrymanders. More such efforts are likely after the midterms, at both the state and local levels.
Jim Crow didn't announce itself as racism either. It announced itself as order. As tradition. As the natural arrangement of things. The Roberts Court has handed that tradition a new vocabulary—Equal Protection, colorblindness, partisan prerogative—and the states that were waiting for permission are using it.
The maps were ready. They've always been ready.
Non incautus futuri
