Memo to Dems: Fight Fire With Fire!

With the rightwing Supreme Court attacking the right to vote yet again, it's past time for Democrats to fully retaliate on gerrymandering. Unleash the 'baconmanders,' writes our columnist Ryan Cooper.

A man holds a sign calling for a fair representative congressional map in Louisiana at the Supreme Court on March 24, 2025. Photo by Jemal Countess.

The ultra-reactionary majority on the Supreme Court has finished gutting the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v. Callais, Justice Samuel Alito struck down the remainder of Section 2 of that law, reversing a lower-court decision that required Louisiana to draw two majority-minority districts, to ensure its African American population had representation. As Adam Serwer explains in the Atlantic, Alito’s argument rests on constitutional prohibitions against racism in the 14th and 15th amendments. A requirement to ensure Black representation is actually an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Alito wrote.

The Republican governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, immediately halted primary elections already in progress so he could draw new maps disenfranchising as many Black residents as possible. The rest of the Republican Party is following suit. They might easily net 13 additional seats just in the South, eliminating a huge chunk of the Congressional Black Caucus. At the state level, it will be a bloodbath for Black representation, just as it was in the 1890s when Republicans’ political ancestors in the Ku Klux Klan finished consolidating Jim Crow tyranny.

Callais is so tendentious, it’s kind of morbidly fascinating.