Outside the Beltway

The Pretzel Logic of SCOTUS on Districting

Plus, I question the timing.

Steven L. Taylor · Friday, May 8, 2026 · 7 comments

State Representative Jason Zachary (R) had the following to say about Tennessee’s dismantlement of the majority-minority House district in the eastern part of the state surrounding Memphis. It should be noted that Memphis is over 60% Black, but is now sliced apart in three segments.

This map was drafted based on politics, based on population and the opportunity for the first time in history to us to – for us to send an entire Republican delegation from Tennessee to represent the state in Washington, D.C. (Source: NPR).

Emphases mine. And note that all House districts are based on population. I keep hearing gerrymander proponents talk about having districts based on population, as if that is some special feature of what they are doing. The districts all have to have roughly the same number of residents. That’s a legal requirement regardless of how they are drawn.

All of this is the result of SCOTUS’ decision that partisan gerrymandering is perfectly legal, but trying to accommodate for diluting minoritiy voters can only be done in limited circumstances.

I think this is really important: the Court claims not to care one whit about how districts are drawn in terms of political outcomes. However, they have decided that majority-minority districts can only be drawn under narrow circumstances, specifically, I guess, where a previous set of maps was drawn by men in white robes who wrote racial epithets on the maps themselves.

I will note that in the abstract, I get the notion that in a perfect world, using race to draw maps should not be necessary. But as the great philosopher Huey Lewis once noted, ain’t no living in a perfect world; ain’t no perfect world anyway.

To blunt, an imperfect world requires imperfect solutions, and there is little doubt that a lot of less-than-overt racism lurks in our politics. Moreover, the power to partisan gerrymander is the power to racially gerrymander, given the high rate of Blacks voting for Democrats

I could digress, therefore, on why judging racial disparities solely on intent and not outcomes is a problem in an imperfect world, but let me focus on the following.

1. The Court has said that partisan gerrymandering is not unjust because it is a matter of politics.
2. Majority-minority districts are unjust unless they are to counter provable intentional racism.

It seems worth pointing out again that because of the extremely high correlation of Black votes being Democratic votes, majority-minority districts are effectively partisan gerrymanders.

The main difference, at least as far as the Court is concerned, is that partisan gerrymanders are imposed by majorities in state legislatures, while the Voting Rights Act-imposed majority-minority districts are indirectly imposed on the states via a combination of Congressional action (now gutted by SCOTUS) and the federal courts.

To me, this is all pretzel-logic: partisan districting is fine, indeed, it is Katy bar the door in terms of states being able to draw whatever they want until it might lead to a Democratic partisan gerrymander that would address long-standing issues of racial injustice, and then all of a sudden the lines matter.

It cannot be stressed enough that states are overtly stating that they can just draw the lines to favor the majority party in their states, both Democratic and Republican states. This is what the Court has given us.

Again, unless the lines are drawn to help Black or Hispanic voters.

This brings me to the timing in all of this. I understand the basic notion that if a district is found to be unconstitutional, it stands to reason that it should be redrawn as soon as it is practicable. I will acknowledge, for example, if the Court found that gross injustice had been created by a set of maps, that disruption in an election year would be warranted. If, to pick a fanciful example, Louisiana’s maps had been engineered to give Democrats 5 seats, and Republicans only two, that would be grossly unjust in my mind, given the partisan makeup of the state, and I could see the need to rectify the situation forthwith.

Although, allow me to pause and note that the high court is fine with partisan gerrymandering, so I guess my hypothetical would not be deemed unjust by our robed sages.

But to return to my point above, if basically any given district really doesn’t matter (else, partisan gerrymandering would matter), then the exact amount of injustice caused by current majority-minority districts is not so grave that it had to be addressed in the middle of campaign season.

Louisiana suspended congressional primaries immediately.

Alabama has primaries in a few weeks, but we might have new districts this year?

The amount of money (both private and public), not to mention hours of work and life choices by candidates around specific district lines, is not trivial. If district lines don’t really matter, which again is the Court’s basic position (indeed, concerns about the representation effects of such lines were declared to be “sociological gobbledygook” by the Chief Justice), then all of this could have waited until the 2028 cycle.

But if, despite Roberts’ complaints to the contrary, the majority is functioning in a partisan fashion, it all has an easier to follow logic, now doesn’t it?

It also occurs to me to wonder where the “we’re a republic, not a democracy” crowd is on this topic. They sure like it when the Electoral College, the Senate, or SCOTUS thwart the majority will. (Mike Lee, who loves him some “republic-not-a-democracy-ing,” just loves the new maps, if his Twitter feed is to be believed).

And to be clear: I am being intellectually consistent. I would prefer a system that clearly rewards the majority, but that doesn’t use institutional mechanisms to shut the minority out entirely. I just want a national legislature that actually represents the interests of the citizenry in a reasonable fashion.

Again, I think any single-seat district system is flawed. It is not possible to draw a set of maps that is compact, competitive, and representative. A proportional representation system can do that. Recognizing we are unlikely to get PR any time soon, I am forced to support remedial fixes like majority-minority districts. And if we have to have single-seat districts, then we need some sort of national standard that takes the power to pick voters out of the hands of politicians.

I would note that, like the quote above, and what legislators were saying in Texas earlier this year, they are now brazenly stating that they are simply trying to maximize partisan advantage (which is why I reluctantly support the Democrats engaging in their own salvos in the redistricting wars and, again, remediation via mechanism as we had under the VRA).