If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.
Good Friday Morning! Especially to an Arkansas cat named Cheddar Big Booty Cheeseburger, who just won Nationwide Pet Insurance’s annual wackiest cat name competition. The owners say the name was inspired by the cat’s size and his enthusiasm for booty spanking. I have no more commentary on that.
Cheeseburger took the crown over a finalist list that reads like a rejected super hero casting sheet someone scribbled on a napkin at 1 a.m: Goofus McDoof Business Horse. Munchie McPurryToes. Orange Julius Caesar Salad. Space Cowboy. Internet Browser. Bad Kitty 5,000. Chatalece C. That last one I’m assuming is the formal name on the legal documents and her friends just call her Chatalece.
Goofus McDoof Business Horse is the reverse mullet of the bunch: party in the front, business in the back. Orange Julius Caesar Salad is three brand names in single combat. Space Cowboy is either a Steve Miller fan or a cat with an unusually clear sense of vocation. Bad Kitty 5,000 does make you wonder exactly how many lives that cat has.
These cat names are about as serious as I take liberal commentary on the Supreme Court opinions these days, which is to say: not at all. Speaking of which, this week the Supreme Court came down 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais. It’s a seismic case that infuriates Democrats, but gets the law correct. I’ll dig into that and more – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- Ann Arbor took down 600 anti-crime signs to be more inclusive. The Michigan city’s Democrat-run Council voted 10-0 last December and finished the citywide removal this week, pulling $18,000 from cash reserves because the police budget had no money for it and removing non-traffic signs didn’t qualify for street funding. Mayor Christopher Taylor, a Democrat, said neighborhood watch signs are “expressions of exclusion.” The Council resolution called the program “rooted in assumptions about who did and did not ‘belong’ in a neighborhood, reinforcing race-based hyper-vigilance and suspicion.” The Ann Arbor City Council put on the public record, by unanimous vote, that telling your neighbors to look out for one another is racist. The Democratic Party has reached the point of removing anti-crime signage to be inclusive of the people the signs are designed to deter. There is no theory of governance under which this makes the city safer. There is no theory of governance under which a crime victim feels more welcomed by the absence of a neighborhood watch sign. Cities that govern this way lose residents, just look at the U-Haul numbers of blue states vs red right now.
- Subscribe to my daily newsletters: The American Almanac for right-of-center news that does not insult your intelligence, Capital Digest for business and market news with a working-class lens, and Conservative Legal News for the legal and constitutional beat.
Where you can find me this week
Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you, find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.
King Charles’s Speech Was a Eulogy for a Britain That No Longer Exists – Conservative Institute
This Is What an Attack on Democracy Looks Like – Conservative Institute
The Press Made Trump the Threat. The Shooter Believed Them. – Conservative Institute
The Voting Rights Act Was a Remedy. The Dissent Defends It as a Right.
What the Court restored in Louisiana v. Callais was the architecture the Voting Rights Act was supposed to be: a means to an end, not the end itself.
For forty years, federal courts have asked one question when a state drew a congressional map. Did Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the federal law that bars voting rules that water down a racial minority’s vote, require this district to be drawn so the minority has a fair shot at electing the candidate of its choice? On Wednesday, the Supreme Court asked the question forty years should have asked first. Does the Equal Protection Clause, the part of the Fourteenth Amendment that orders the government to treat citizens equally regardless of race, permit a district drawn mainly by skin color in the first place? Six justices said no.
Louisiana v. Callais came down 6-3 on April 29. Justice Alito wrote the majority, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson. The Court struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district. Louisiana had been sued either way. After the 2020 census, the state drew a six-seat map with one majority-Black district. Black voters sued in 2022, and a federal judge in the Middle District of Louisiana held that the map likely violated Section 2 because it did not include a second majority-Black district. So the legislature drew one in 2024. That map was the state’s CD-6. A different group of plaintiffs immediately sued, calling the new map a racial gerrymander.
As Justice Alito put the irony in the opening of the opinion, “when the State drew a new map that contained such a district, its new map was challenged as a racial gerrymander.” Without the Voting Rights Act forcing the state’s hand, the Court held, Louisiana had no good enough reason to use race as the line-drawing tool. The Court did not strike Section 2. It tightened the test so much that the rules governing redistricting since 1986 are over. Those rules came from a case called Thornburg v. Gingles, which set the rules for forty years of racial-gerrymandering lawsuits.
Kagan closes her dissent by giving the game away. She writes:
“I dissent because Congress elected otherwise. I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”
The right Kagan defends is “racial equality in electoral opportunity.” Not equality of opportunity. Racial equality. Districts drawn so that Americans of one skin color get an equal chance to elect representatives who share that skin color. That is the language of permanence. Of entitlement. Of a right that runs forever, indexed to a person’s race. The dissent calls that a foundational constitutional protection. The problem with her assertion is in the Constitution itself: the Fourteenth Amendment was written to forbid exactly that — a government that grants rights according to the race of the citizen receiving them.
That is the argument Callais resolves.
What the Court Said
The opinion is tighter than its critics admit. Justice Alito wrote the controlling line:
“Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. Compliance with section 2 thus could not justify the state’s use of race-based redistricting here.”
That is the holding. The test behind it has four decades of warning labels on it.
The Supreme Court applied the strictest test the Constitution allows when government sorts citizens by race. In order to allow race-based discrimination, a state has to show a serious reason for using race, and it has to show that no race-neutral approach would have worked (the technical term is strict scrutiny). For four decades, federal courts treated “we had to follow the Voting Rights Act” as the serious reason. The Constitution’s equal-treatment guarantee forbade race-based districting; the VRA required it; courts split the difference by treating the law as enough to satisfy the requirement.
That is the circular framework Callais breaks. A law cannot override the Fourteenth Amendment.
The case itself ran the standard track. Louisiana drew a six-seat congressional map after the 2020 census with one majority-Black district. Black voters sued under Section 2 to demand a second. A federal judge ordered the legislature to draw one. The legislature complied. Then a new group of plaintiffs sued back, arguing the new map was itself a racial gerrymander — the legal term for a district drawn mainly because of the race of the voters in it. A three-judge panel agreed. The case went up (as Alito and other conservatives noted: it is all but impossible to tease out whether this is a partisan gerrymander or a racial one).
Justice Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, said it harder in a separate opinion. The Court, he wrote, “should never have interpreted §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.'”
The majority opinion gave four reasons the old test no longer fits. The locked-in voting discrimination that ran the South in 1965 is gone. Party affiliation now tracks race so closely that “racial polarization” is sometimes just partisan polarization in disguise. In 2019, a separate ruling called Rucho v. Common Cause held that purely partisan gerrymanders are not something federal courts can second-guess. And computer-drawn alternative maps now let plaintiffs test whether a state could have hit the same goals without using race at all.
Plaintiffs in voting-rights suits, Alito wrote, were “dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” Going forward, a winning challenger has to prove the state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”
That is the new test. Intent, not effect.
Forty Years of Cases Pointing the Same Direction
The opinion did not appear out of nowhere. Six earlier cases drew the line Callais finally crossed.
In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court ruled that drawing district lines mainly by race could violate the Constitution’s equal-treatment guarantee even when the state was trying to follow the Voting Rights Act. Two years later, Miller v. Johnson (1995) said that the strictest test applies any time race is the main thing driving the line-drawing. Both cases forced the courts to ask whether following the Voting Rights Act could really be a free pass on the Constitution. Both ducked the hard answer.
In Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), the Court drew the rule’s other edge. Public schools cannot assign students by race, even when the goal is integration. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the sentence that sums up the principle: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” That is the constitutional rule. Forty years of voting-rights case law treated it as not applying to redistricting. The carve-out had a logic. Section 2 was a remedy. The reason for the remedy was that Black and white voters in covered states reliably preferred different candidates, and minority voters could not win their candidates of choice in a non-racially-drawn district. The Constitution allowed the remedy as long as that reason held. The remedy was temporary by design.
Shelby County v. Holder (2013) ended the part of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states to get federal sign-off before changing their voting rules. That was a 1965 mechanism Congress had renewed in twenty-five-year cycles. The decision left Section 2 as the main federal lever. Allen v. Milligan (2023) stopped short of scrapping the 1986 rules and held Alabama’s congressional map violated Section 2. Justice Kavanaugh, in a separate opinion, flagged the question Callais now answers. Race-based redistricting, he wrote, could not run “indefinitely.” There had to be a limit. The Court was watching for a case to draw it.
That same June, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Court applied the same logic to college admissions. A remedy that was supposed to be temporary had become permanent. The Constitution does not allow permanent race-based government rules wearing the costume of a temporary fix.
Callais applies the same logic to redistricting. The pieces were already in place. The Court was waiting for the case.
What Kagan’s Dissent Defends
Justice Kagan’s dissent runs forty pages. Strip out the procedural arguments, the practical-consequences arguments, and the argument about following earlier rulings, and the closing paragraph quoted at the top of this essay carries the rest. The right Kagan defends, in her own words, is “racial equality in electoral opportunity.”
That is not the language of remedy. It is the language of right.
Kagan is not arguing that Section 2 needs more time to do its work. She is arguing that the right Congress granted is the right to have districts drawn so that Black voters can elect Black candidates. That drawing district lines by skin color is a foundational constitutional entitlement, available with no end date, regardless of whether the original problem the rule was built to fix still exists. The line-drawing tool is race. The product is a district whose constitutional legitimacy depends on the racial mix of its voters.
Shift the race in that sentence and the problem becomes obvious. Districts drawn so white voters can elect white candidates. So Asian voters can elect Asian candidates. So Hispanic voters can elect Hispanic candidates. So Jewish voters can elect Jewish candidates. None of those formulations would survive a single news cycle, and most would not survive a single sentence. The reason this version survives is not that it sits on firmer constitutional ground than the others. It survives because it benefits one political coalition. The Democratic Party is unhappy here because the ruling cuts into its bottom line, not because the underlying principle is racist.
That is the position the Equal Protection Clause was written to forbid.
Roberts answered the principle nineteen years ago, in Parents Involved. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. It is not a slogan. It is the constitutional rule. Race-based government remedies are tolerable only as remedies. They must be temporary, narrow, and aimed at a real harm the government can show. The moment they become permanent features, they become the harm they were supposed to fix.
The Voting Rights Act’s own design said this from 1965 forward. The federal sign-off rule that Shelby County ended in 2013 was supposed to expire. Congress had to renew it every twenty-five years for a reason. The 1986 case-law rules that Callais just upended assumed two things. Black and white voters in covered states reliably preferred different candidates. And minority voters therefore could not elect their candidates of choice in a district drawn without using race. That was the reason for the rule. When the reason runs out, the rule runs out with it.
Election law professor Rick Hasen, on NPR Wednesday, conceded the point in passing. “If we move to a situation where there was no more racially polarized voting” — meaning Black and white voters stopped reliably picking different candidates — “then there are no Section 2 cases to win,” he told Mary Louise Kelly. Section 2 is, in his own words, “self-sunsetting.” The structure was always temporary.
Kagan’s dissent treats it as permanent. The exception as the rule. The remedy as the right.
That is what the Court did. Not by striking Section 2, but by reading it the way the Constitution requires it to be read: as a remedy with a sunset, not a foundational right with no end.
The Democratic Party would care significantly less about this if Black voters split more evenly between the parties. The naked partisanship is what is driving things. That goes unsaid, but it is the political reality across the board. We know it because left-leaning institutions have already been hammered in court for the same logic — Harvard for discriminating against Asian applicants, multiple universities for discriminating against Jewish students, employers for race-screened hiring. The Equal Protection Clause has reached every one of those cases. Roberts is right. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. It applies in admissions, in employment, in school assignment, and now in redistricting. It applies to the political coalition that benefits from the discrimination as cleanly as it applies to the one that does not.
How the Coverage Reports the Opposite of the Opinion
The press headlines are reading the dissent, not the opinion.
Stacey Abrams, in an op-ed for MS NOW, wrote that “the Supreme Court has all but killed the law that helped kill Jim Crow” and that the ruling “tells a lie to America.” The Jim Crow reference is the admission Abrams did not mean to make. Jim Crow sorted citizens by race and assigned them to different schools, different rail cars, different polling places. Sorting citizens by race was the mechanism. Hostility was the intent. The Court’s ruling forbids the mechanism. The position Abrams defends — districts drawn by skin color as a permanent feature of constitutional law — keeps the mechanism and swaps friendly intent for the hostile one. That is the trade Kagan’s dissent makes. The Equal Protection Clause was written to refuse it. The clause does not pause to ask whose hand is on the tool. Sorting citizens by race is the harm the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified to end. A friendlier hand on the same tool is still a hand on the same tool.
Rick Hasen, on NPR, called Callais “one of the most important and most pernicious decisions of the Supreme Court in the last century.” He then volunteered, on the same broadcast, that “it won’t just be Republicans doing this. It will also be Democrats doing this. And so the losers are going to be the minority voters as well as the American people.” The framing collapses on contact with the speaker’s own next sentence. If both parties will use the new ruling equally, then the new ruling is not a partisan gift to one side. It is a constitutional rule that ties both parties’ hands the same way. That is what equal protection under the law is supposed to mean.
Slate ran the headline “The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century” and pivoted, in the same piece, to a call for “SCOTUS reform,” meaning restructuring the Court itself. The framing makes the institutional press position plain. A Court that applies the same equal-treatment rule to admissions, to schools, and to redistricting is, for that reason, a Court that needs to be restructured. The opinion is not radical. The framing is.
What This Means for November
Three weeks ago, in “The Arithmetic of November,” I argued that gerrymandering claims have always been the standard losing-side explanation in every cycle for the last fifty years. Gerrymandering matters at the margin. It has never overridden the fundamentals in a setup like this one.
Callais does not change that math. It changes who gets to weaponize the claim, and on what legal footing.
Last week, in Issue 488, I noted that the redistricting fight is not the start of this round. It is the middle. The starting gun was the 2020 census. In May 2022, the Census Bureau’s own Post-Enumeration Survey — the Bureau’s retroactive accuracy check on its own count — conceded the count had overcounted eight states and undercounted six. Hawaii was padded by 6.79 percent. Rhode Island by 5.05. Delaware by 5.45. Minnesota by 3.84. New York by 3.44. Massachusetts by 2.24. Arkansas was short 5.04 percent, Tennessee 4.78, Mississippi 4.11, Florida by roughly 750,000 people, and Texas by about 560,000. Six of the eight overcounts were reliably blue. Five of the six undercounts were reliably red. The congressional seats apportioned on those numbers stayed apportioned for the full decade.
That is the foundation. Every fight over every map this cycle is being fought on lines drawn from a count the Census Bureau itself admitted was wrong.
Callais drops on top of all of that.
The states immediately back in play are Louisiana CD-6 itself, plus the Section-2-protected majority-minority districts in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi. Florida did not wait. The legislature passed a new congressional map the day of the decision, in language Hasen himself flagged as a re-redistricting that could net Republicans four additional seats. Texas already redrew mid-decade in 2025, and the Supreme Court allowed those maps in December. California countered with Proposition 50 to redraw its own. Virginia is in litigation. New York, California, and Illinois are all losing seats next cycle as Americans physically leave blue states for red ones.
Both sides are positioning to claim the other side stole the election through the maps. Democrats are calling Callais a smothering of the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, when the wave shows up, will say the same about California’s Prop 50, New York’s mid-cycle moves, and Virginia. Both will be partly right. Neither will be mostly right. The truth is what I wrote last week and will write again. Every state in the Union is gerrymandered. There is no such thing as a neutral redistricting decision. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a “reform package” or lying.
What changes after Callais is that the rules governing the fight are finally consistent. Race cannot be the line-drawing tool. Politics still can. Rucho already said partisan gerrymanders are not something federal courts can stop. After Callais, racial gerrymanders still are. But the test is intent, not effect. Both parties will draw aggressive maps. Both parties will draw them on partisan grounds. Neither will be permitted to do it explicitly by skin color.
Consistency Is Conservative
The conservative legal movement has argued for thirty years that the Equal Protection Clause means the same thing in college admissions, in school assignment, and in drawing voting districts. The Court has now said it across three cases. Parents Involved. SFFA. Callais. Race-based government rules are tolerable only as remedies. They cannot become permanent features. They cannot become foundational rights. The exception cannot become the rule.
Every milestone in this country’s long fight over equal treatment has aimed at the same destination. The Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment. Brown v. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Movement itself. The destination is a country where the government does not sort its citizens by race. Some of those milestones used race-based remedies to get there. That was permitted because the remedies were temporary. The destination was the law’s whole point.
Kagan’s dissent defends the means as the end. The exception as the rule. The remedy as the right.
The exception is over.
The way to stop drawing districts by race is to stop drawing districts by race. The Court just remembered.
Links of the week
Political Violence and the Willful Self-Deception of the Left – RealClearPolitics
The Machiavellian Moment Returns – The American Mind
From One Assassination Attempt to the Next: Mainstreaming Violence Against a President – American Greatness
Kimmel Survives Melania Joke, Exposes Free Speech Hypocrisy: These stars got fired for far less, and the Legacy Media stayed mum – Hollywood in TOTO
Women Are Having Fewer Kids Because They Don’t Want Them – Chronicles
Augmented reality brings Revolutionary War to life at Army Museum – Military Times
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Today’s parents spent 2x more time with their kids than previous generations.
Satire of the week
Overambitious Man Wants To Get 2 Things Done Today – Onion
Trump, Omar Argue Over Whether It’s ‘Two Corinthians’ Or ‘Eleven Corinthians’ – Babylon Bee
Amtrak Informs Small Town Girl Living In A Lonely World That They Don’t Actually Have A Midnight Train Going Anywhere – Babylon Bee
Pentagon defunds anti–think tank missile – Duffel Blog
Girl Boss Hires Girl Thugs to Beat Up Girl Union – The Hard Times
“Dare I Say, You’ve Made A Right State Of Our Old Haunt” King Tells America – Waterford Whispers News