Republicans put faith in ‘racist’ gerrymandering to hold onto power

In Democratic offices on Capitol Hill last week, the mood veered between fury and despair.

Two bombshell court rulings have enabled the Republicans to redraw congressional maps in their favour before November’s crucial midterm elections. The court decisions hand Republicans a potentially decisive advantage, bolstering their slim hopes of holding the House of Representatives despite Donald Trump’s dismal approval rating.

First, the US supreme court last month struck down a congressional voting map that created a new majority-Black district in Louisiana. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the conservative justices blew a hole in the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 legislation that barred racial discrimination in voting, a triumph of the civil rights movement.

Within days, a raft of Republican-held states had rolled out new congressional maps that aim to wipe out several majority-Black districts across the south. In Tennessee, an aggressive GOP gerrymander carves the state’s one Democratic district in Memphis into three, splitting up the city’s Black population.

Two of the new districts now stretch across the Tennessee River as far as the Nashville suburbs 200 miles away. By next year, the largest majority-Black city in the United States will have no African-American representative in Washington.

As the map was ratified amid a furious standoff at the state capitol, Black Democratic representative Justin Jones denounced Tennessee house speaker Cameron Sexton as the “grand wizard in chief” – a reference to the Ku Klux Klan – and handed a Republican lawmaker a Confederate flag.

Democrats accused the supreme court justices of dragging the US back to the era of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchising millions of Black Americans.

Democrats received another hammer blow days later, when Virginia’s highest court overturned the result of a statewide referendum to redraw its congressional map. The Democratic gerrymander, launched to counteract the wave of Republican redistricting, was expected to net the party four more seats in November. But in a 4-3 ruling, the court said Virginia Democrats had broken state law when they rushed the referendum through in April.

“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” Justice D Arthur Kelsey wrote for the majority.

Instead, the two court rulings give Republicans a clear upper hand. The GOP is expected to gain as many as 10 new seats, while Democrats have few options to respond before the midterms. In a desperate phone call between party leaders last week, Democrats reportedly toyed with far-fetched ploys to reinstate the gerrymandered map in Virginia, including replacing the entire state court.

Only days ago, Democrats were confident of a blue wave victory, capitalising on mounting public anger at Trump’s war with Iran and its impact on a stagnant US economy. Suddenly, the Republicans have the wind at the backs and the House is back in play.

“It’s a huge setback,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic strategist and former adviser to President Clinton.

“Should the Democrats win now, it will likely be a very tight majority, and that will make it less likely that they can enact all that they wish. There'll be no strong party to govern, and a handful of rebels can cause absolute chaos.”

Democrats have appealed to the supreme court in a long-shot bid to overturn the ruling in Virginia, but few have confidence that the six conservative justices on the bench of nine judges will look favourably on the request.

“We’ve seen activist courts before, but this is a case where social equity has been absolutely damned,” said Sheinkopf. “It is so damaging to American democracy. The court is effectively saying if you’re a Black voter in the south… your vote has limited value.”

Justice Samuel Alito, who was nominated to the supreme court by George W Bush, argued that the Louisiana map was an “unconstitutional gerrymander” because lawmakers had illegally considered race to create the new district. Alito argued that past protections to create districts where non-white voters were the majority were no longer required because “the racial gap in voter registration and turnout [has] largely disappeared”.

The court’s latest assault on the Voting Rights Act has redoubled Democratic calls for sweeping reform of the bench. Party officials and many legal experts increasingly view the six conservative justices as an active threat to US democracy.

“We are past the point of lamenting,” Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler wrote on social media after the Louisiana ruling. “Either Democrats are going to fundamentally remake this institution or they are co-signing autocracy.”

Since the 6-3 conservative majority was cemented during Trump’s first term as president, the supreme court has issued a string of momentous decisions that have undone decades of progressive law. Landmark rulings have overturned legal precedents on abortion, environmental protections and gun control.

The court’s bombshell 2024 ruling granting Trump, who at the time was a former president seeking a second term, sweeping immunity from prosecution, derailed the criminal cases against him, including charges over his role in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol in 2021.

In a blistering dissenting opinion at the time, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices on the bench, said the ruling established the US president as “a king above the law”. Shielded by that court decision, Trump has systematically tested and expanded the limits of executive power since taking back the presidency. Democrats fear that even if they were to regain the White House and both chambers of Congress at the 2028 election, Republicans could stymie their agenda with continuous appeals to the supreme court.

Joe Biden explored court reform during his presidency after the outrage that followed the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, striking down the constitutional right to abortion after almost half a century. But many Democrats remain squeamish about radical proposals to expand the court, packing the bench with liberal justices, arguing that Republicans would only respond in kind, setting off an arms race that wrecks the court’s legitimacy altogether.

Yet a growing chorus of voters, activists, lawyers and lawmakers believe that line has already been crossed. Public support for the institution is at historic lows and court reform is certain to be a key campaign platform among Democrats vying for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028.

“I think you will see more Democrats running on broader structural reforms,” said Democratic strategist Jared Leopold. “Term limits are certainly a possibility. It's not just going to be about restoring balance. It's going to be about how to reform a system that feels broken for so many people.”

Despite the crushing court defeats, however, most pollsters still put Democrats as favourites to regain the House majority, as Trump’s approval rating continues to slide. A CNN poll last week found that only 30% of Americans approve of the president’s handling of the economy as the Iran war sends petrol prices soaring.

In comments that will be replayed in Democratic attack ads for the rest of the year, Trump said last week of the economic cost of the war: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. Every American understands.”

“Trump can mess with the maps but he can’t change how unpopular he is right now,” said Leopold. “That is ultimately going to be a massive problem for Republicans in November.”

Photograph by Sam Wolfe/Bloomberg via Getty Images