The Supreme Court this week allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that a lower court found intentionally discriminated against Black voters, and voting rights advocates on the left are now openly admitting they have few tools left to fight back. Their candid assessments reveal just how thoroughly the Court's conservative supermajority has reshaped the legal landscape around race-based redistricting, and how little the progressive playbook can do about it.
The ruling followed the Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais in late April, which NPR described as the "latest undermining" of the federal Voting Rights Act. Together, the two decisions have left Section 2 of the Act, the provision that once served as the primary federal weapon against racial discrimination in redistricting, in a state that many legal experts say makes it practically impossible to enforce.
For conservatives who have long argued that race-conscious map-drawing is itself a form of discrimination, this is the system working as intended. For the left, it is a reckoning, one that exposes how dependent their electoral strategy has been on federal courts mandating favorable district lines.
The remaining options for voting rights advocates are narrow and geographically limited. State-level voting rights acts exist in roughly a dozen states, but every single one was enacted under unified Democratic control. No state with a Republican or divided government has passed such a law. That means the Deep South, where the left says protections are most needed, is precisely where these laws will not pass.
Democratic lawmakers have recently pushed bills in Michigan, New Jersey, and Delaware. The Delaware John Lewis Voting Rights Act was introduced on Thursday. But these state laws generally cover only state and local elections, not congressional races. They are, at best, a partial patch on a much larger problem.
And even the state laws already on the books may not survive. Just over a week after the Callais decision, the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Illinois Voting Rights Act of 2011, arguing it unconstitutionally requires the use of race in state legislative redistricting. More lawsuits against similar state laws may follow.
Wilfred Codrington III, a constitutional law professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law, told NPR he is worried the Supreme Court itself could eventually target these state-level protections:
"I'm nervous that the Supreme Court may sort of have those in its crosshairs as well."
That concern is not unfounded. The Court's conservative majority has shown a consistent willingness to limit race-conscious government action across multiple areas of law, from its recent clearing of Alabama's redrawn congressional map to its landmark affirmative action decisions.
There are signs the executive branch is paying attention to the state-level maneuvering. Jesus Osete, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, responded on X to a post by Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, who had signed state voting rights protections into law the day before the Callais ruling.
Moore wrote: "Even if Washington won't protect your vote, I will." Osete's reply was three words: "Who's gonna tell him?"
The DOJ's public affairs office did not respond to NPR's request for comment about Osete's post. But the exchange suggests the Trump administration views these state-level workarounds with skepticism, or possibly as targets.
That posture is consistent with the administration's broader approach to race-conscious government action. The Trump administration had already signaled its expectations about how the Court would handle other constitutional questions, and its willingness to challenge progressive legal frameworks has been a defining feature of this term.
With federal protections weakened, some redistricting observers have floated a different strategy: Democratic-controlled states could engage in the same partisan gerrymandering that Republicans have long practiced, spreading minority voters, who tend to support Democrats, into more districts to maximize Democratic seats.
Nick Stephanopoulos, an election law professor at Harvard Law School, argued in an upcoming Columbia Law Review article that this approach doesn't have to come at the expense of minority representation. He pointed to California's new congressional map, which Democrats drew to flip five Republican-held seats without eliminating any minority-opportunity districts.
"This tradeoff should not be present in big blue states like Illinois, New York, California and so on. It should generally be possible to design maps that are more skewed in a Democratic direction, but that at least maintain current levels of minority representation."
The key, Stephanopoulos said, is distributing Democratic voters "in ways that make more districts reasonably safe, but not overly safe" for Democratic candidates.
Set aside for a moment the irony of voting rights advocates embracing partisan gerrymandering, the very practice they have spent decades denouncing, as a tool for racial fairness. The more immediate problem is geographic. This strategy works only in blue states. It does nothing for minority voters in the Republican-controlled South, which is exactly where advocates say protections are most needed.
Stephanopoulos acknowledged this directly: "Only federal action would respond to the vacuum that's left in the South."
The Trump administration challenged California's map as "tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander," but the Supreme Court ultimately allowed the state to use it. How lower courts interpret and apply these precedents going forward remains an open question, one that has already generated friction between appellate judges and the DOJ in other contexts.
Any federal fix is years away, at minimum. Bipartisan support for minority-voter protections in Congress has evaporated over the past two decades. The path to a restored Voting Rights Act would require Democrats to win back both chambers and the White House, and even then, the Supreme Court's conservative majority could strike down a new law.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement hours after the Callais ruling:
"We will not rest until the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act becomes the law of the land and we end the era of voter suppression in America once and for all."
But Jeffries's own party failed to pass that legislation when it controlled Congress and the White House during the Biden administration. National bans on partisan gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting, included in voting rights bills during that period, couldn't overcome Republican opposition in a closely divided Senate.
In a recent interview, Jeffries said passing voting rights protections and exploring "massive judicial reform, state by state and at the federal level" are among Democratic priorities if they win back the House this November. The mention of judicial reform, a phrase that often signals court-packing or structural changes to the judiciary, is worth watching. The Court's docket is already crowded with politically charged cases, and any Democratic push to alter its composition would provoke a constitutional confrontation.
Some election reformers have gone further, calling for replacing the current single-member, winner-take-all congressional districts with a proportional representation system. Supporters say this would help ensure fairer representation for minority voters. But such a change would require altering a federal law that currently bans proportional representation, a heavy lift under any political conditions.
Codrington, the Cardozo law professor, framed the current moment in historical terms. He told NPR that "the bulk of Black people live in the states of the old Confederacy" and that "that is exactly where you're seeing the worst types of retrenchment." He urged states and local communities to pursue "some measure of fairness" through whatever means remain available.
"States are in this unique position to do some things. But we need a federal government to be involved and invested in this problem if we're going to have any sort of wide promotion of democracy across the United States."
What voting rights advocates rarely acknowledge is the tension at the heart of their project. For decades, Section 2 enforcement required drawing districts where racial minorities formed a majority, concentrating minority voters in ways that, by definition, reduced their influence in surrounding districts. The left treated this as a civil rights imperative. Conservatives called it racial sorting by another name.
The Supreme Court has been wrestling with difficult line-drawing questions across multiple areas of law this term. In the redistricting context, the conservative majority has concluded that the Constitution does not require, and may not permit, the race-first approach that progressives have championed.
That leaves the left with state laws that cover only blue states, a gerrymandering strategy that works only in blue states, and a federal legislative agenda that requires winning elections they haven't won. The one institution they cannot control, the Supreme Court, is the one that keeps saying no.
When every remaining option depends on holding power you don't have, in places you already control, the problem isn't the Court. The problem is that your ideas can't win where they'd actually matter.
