![\"Rep.](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/AP26127563962653.jpg?fit=3527%2C2359\")
The ink had<\/span> barely dried on the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act when Republican lawmakers raced to deliver on the barely veiled promises of the court\u2019s decision: the decimation of Black political power and a revival of Jim Crow-era racist voter suppression.<\/p>\n In Tennessee on Thursday, Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a half-century-old law<\/a> prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and then the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed new redistricting maps that eliminate the state\u2019s only Black-majority district. The 9th Congressional District, also Tennessee\u2019s only reliable Democratic seat, will be carved into three \u2014 purposefully redrawn for each piece to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. The votes of Memphis\u2019s 63 percent Black population will be diluted to near irrelevance; the entire state will be handed to Republicans.<\/p>\n With the right-wing justices\u2019 blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n No one can act surprised. This was the predicted outcome of the Supreme Court\u2019s Louisiana v. Callais decision<\/a>, which decimated Section 2 of the embattled Voting Rights Act, a provision that had protected minority voters from redistricting. With the right-wing justices\u2019 blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering and reestablish the pre-civil-rights-era status quo ante.<\/p>\n It stands to reason that Republicans are not representing the interests of Black Tennesseans, some 17 percent of the population, overwhelmingly Democrats. These residents only have one representative in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen \u2014 the lone Democrat among the state\u2019s nine congressional seats. That is the seat being eliminated by the new maps passed by Tennessee\u2019s largely white legislature.<\/p>\n The situation is already one in which Black working-class interests are hardly represented \u2014 and nor would greater Black representation in the state necessarily ensure the delivery of racial justice and the economic justice it requires.<\/p>\n The point is that Black disenfranchisement both reflects and produces conditions of white supremacist rule, wherein greater anti-Black oppression is assured<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThese maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump,\u201d said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson at the Tennessee statehouse on Thursday. Pearson, a progressive activist and one of the state\u2019s few Black representatives, is running for a seat in Congress and was neck and neck in polling for his August primary against Cohen, the 76-year-old incumbent. The redrawn maps would likely foreclose his chance to represent South Memphis in Washington.<\/p>\n Pearson called<\/a> the gerrymandered maps a \u201cpolitical lynching\u201d that \u201cset our state back over 150 years.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Trump, who is historically unpopular, has every reason to push his GOP to use newly unconstrained gerrymandering capacities in advance of the midterms. Right-wing redistricting efforts go beyond a scramble for November, though, and sit within a larger project of white supremacist backlash.<\/p>\n Like in Tennessee, Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina<\/a> all called special legislative sessions \u2014 as explicitly ordered by Trump \u2014 to push new redistricting maps that will decimate majority-Black districts and deliver congressional seats to Republicans.<\/p>\n According to the cynical rationale of the Supreme Court conservatives, such maps would not violate what\u2019s left of the Voting Rights Act, because the GOP is not openly describing their gerrymander as targeting Black voters.<\/p>\n \u201cThe more racist you are as a party, the more insulated you are from Voting Rights Act liability under this decision,\u201d Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told<\/a> Bolts Magazine about the Callais ruling. \u201cIf there were a party called the Klan party, right now, it would trigger an awful lot of nonwhite opposition based on the party\u2019s platform. But this opinion says, you have to set the party\u2019s platform entirely aside to figure out if there\u2019s been any damage based on race. So the more you can tie the two together, the more insulated you are.\u201d<\/p>\n In short, as Levitt put it, \u201cthe most racist partisan gerrymandering is going to be the most immune from a VRA challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n Tennessee Republicans proved precisely this point on Thursday. Striding into the statehouse to disenfranchise Black voters, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner wore a giant Trump 2024 flag as a cape.<\/p>\n Striding into the statehouse to disenfranchise Black voters, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner wore a giant Trump 2024 flag.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n As other states follow Tennessee\u2019s example, the consequences of Callais could see the largest-ever drop in the number of Black lawmakers in Congress. The previous record was set, NPR reported<\/a>, in the post-Reconstruction backlash, by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session.<\/p>\n In response to racist Republican gerrymandering, Democrats can play their own game of redistricting \u2014 but there\u2019s a reason the Callais decision is understood as a gift to Republicans.<\/p>\n \u201cThe states controlled by Republicans where there are majority-minority districts have no internal constraint on how much they can screw over Black voters, because Black voters are not voting for that party,\u201d Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford\u2019s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, told<\/a> Slate.<\/p>\n Democrats could expand a small number of safe seats in New York and California, for example, by eliminating minority voter districts. As Karlan noted, however, this would be politically unpalatable because \u201cthe politics of the state are not going to look favorably on that, and the Democrats in those states depend on Black and Latino voters in statewide races.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Karlan, in this race to the bottom, Republican-led election fixing will not be addressed without a different Congress, a different president, and a powerful political movement to hold politicians accountable.<\/p>\n \u201cVoters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
Trump\u2019s Larger Project<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\n