Late last month, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a bombshell decision that will have a huge effect on Mississippi politics.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the court ruled that you can’t redistrict based purely on race. It overturned a previous federal court decision that compelled the Louisiana state legislature to create a second black Congressional district.
Louisiana has six Congressmen. Prior to 2024, only one is black. Louisiana's population is one-third black. So the NAACP and the ACLU believed there should be two, not one, black Congressmen. So they sued in federal court and won. The Fifth Circuit upheld the ruling. A new district was gerrymandered and now Louisiana has two black Congressmen.
As a result, the state legislature had to gerrymander some strange-looking Congressional districts to comply with the federal court order. (See Louisiana map on the right.) The new green district is a thin sliver of population that crisscrosses the state from the northwest to the southeast.
Twelve white voters sued back. They were recruited by attorneys who have opposed racial gerrymandering across the country for years. A three-judge federal panel ruled in favor of the white plaintiffs, creating a clear opinion split. The U. S. Supreme Court intervened and issued the Louisiana v. Calais decision.
The Supreme Court split 6-3. The dissenting judges were Kagan, Sotomayer and Jackson, all appointed by Democratic presidents. All six affirming judges were appointed by Republican presidents.
The meat of the opinion is the change in the standard by which discrimination is determined. In the past, any gerrymandering that resulted in unequal racial representation was considered illegal. The new standard under the Callais decision is intentional racial discrimination.
That’s a big change. Proving unequal results is a big difference from proving that the unequal results were caused by intentional racism. Intentionality is difficult to prove.
In the case of Louisiana v. Calais, racial intentionality was fundamental from the get-go. The entire point of the weird skinny gerrymandered district was to produce a second Black Congressman. That’s what the Supreme Court said you can’t do anymore. Racial results cannot be the intentional results of gerrymandering.
This will immediately affect the current Mississippi federal lawsuit to redistrict the three state supreme court districts. Northern District Judge Sharion Aycock ruled earlier this year, ordering the state legislature to redraw those districts to produce more Black state supreme court judges. Only four have ever been elected with the current districts. The new U. S. Supreme Court ruling means Aycock’s Mississippi ruling will be overturned and the existing state supreme court districts, which are generally three big blocks from north to south, will remain the same.
Immediately after the U. S. Supreme Court ruled, Gov. Tate Reeves announced plans for a legislative special session to redraw Mississippi’s Congressional districts. It’s no secret Reeves would love to get rid of Congressman Bennie Thompson, who led the Congressional fight to prosecute Trump for the Jan. 6 riot.
That may not be easy for Reeves to do. First, Mississippi’s Congressional districts are not clearly gerrymandered. They look pretty normal and common sensical. Second, as the lone Black Congressman, any such effort to unseat Thompson through redistricting will look pretty racially intentional, especially in Mississippi.
The Supreme Court decision does not affect intentional redistricting to get rid of Democrats. That’s not unconstitutional. Is it race or politics? Here in Mississippi, it’s hard to separate the two. Given that 37.7 percent of Mississippians are Black, having one Black Congressman out of four seems reasonable. If anything, it seems overly favorable to whites.
Given the fact that Mississippi’s current districts are not weirdly shaped and clearly gerrymandered, it is better to leave them as they are rather than to start a huge race war.
