Left-wing organizations are sounding the alarm that Democrats could lose as many as 19 congressional seats in the near future if the Supreme Court decides to ax the principle of drawing congressional districts along racial lines.
Reacting to the potential for a massive shake-up in the House, Atlanta-based Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo doubled down on support for redistricting. Fair Fight Action was founded by unsuccessful Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
“The only way to stop it is to play offense—aggressively redraw maps wherever possible, focus relentlessly on taking back Congress, and be ready to use that power to pass real pro-democracy legislation and hold this corrupted court accountable,” Groh-Wargo said in a statement reported by Politico.
A recent brief first reported on by Politico from Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund openly worries that the court changing the interpretation of Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 could “cement one-party control of the U.S. House for at least a generation.”
The brief goes on to note that the Supreme Court has already found Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which deals with federal review of changes to election laws in the states, to be unconstitutional in the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder.
In the upcoming Supreme Court case, Louisiana v. Callais, that is to be reheard next week, the state of Louisiana is asking the highest court in the land to end “race-based redistricting” on the grounds that it is incompatible with the principles of equal protection. If the court agrees with Louisiana, then it could lead to much worse electoral outcomes for Democrats, who rely on gerrymandered congressional districts to get elected. The court first heard the case in March.
At the heart of the legal case is whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been interpreted correctly under the precedent set by a previous Supreme Court case called Thornburg v. Gingles, which instituted a multipronged test to determine whether racial minorities were having their voting power unlawfully diluted.
The Supreme Court’s potential rewriting of the game of politics comes as both Republicans and Democrats are looking to stack the congressional map in their favor. In Texas, the state Legislature has redrawn the borders of House of Representatives’ districts, while in California, Democrats are pushing a referendum vote to overrule the California Citizens Redistricting Commission to redraw the state’s congressional map to further benefit them.
“[Republicans are] playing by a different set of rules. They can’t win by the traditional game, so they want to change the game,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said. GOP-dominated Missouri and Indiana also have been mulling efforts to redistrict. Meanwhile, Republicans have raised the issue of not counting illegal aliens in the decennial census, which is used to determine the number of House seats each state gets.
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