Supreme Court decision sets off gerrymandering scramble

By Tierney Sneed, Fredreka Schouten, John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — A day after the Supreme Court further gutted the Voting Rights Act, Republican-led states are eying changes to boost the GOP’s gerrymandering effort at the expense of voters of color, while voting rights groups are trying to limit the impact of the ruling on this year’s midterms.

The Supreme Court kicked off the scramble by throwing out a Louisiana congressional map that had two Black-majority districts in an opinion that will make it significantly harder to challenge redistricting plans as discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act.

Leaders of Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature said they are preparing to draw a new congressional map to be used for November’s midterms, even as ballots have already put been in the mail for the May 16 primary. GOP officials said they won’t count the votes for US House candidates in the primary.

In Tennessee, top Republican officials faced growing public calls to launch a special legislative session with the goal of removing the state’s only Democratic congressman. Right-wing pressure for redistricting is also building in other states, including Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama.

Meanwhile, a group of Black voters who were defending Louisiana’s current congressional map cautioned the Supreme Court on Thursday against allowing the state to rush into a hasty redistricting based on the court’s decision.

“The governor has already indicated that he intends to cancel the ongoing Republican and Democratic primary elections in which voters have already cast ballots and on which candidates have already heavily expended their money, time, and resources,” the Black voters who were defending the maps told the Supreme Court, while citing past orders from the justices urging courts to be wary of disrupting election planning with last-minute moves.

“Such a drastic action,” the voters said, “is unnecessary and unwarranted.”

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday was able to use the Supreme Court’s ruling to help get a congressional plan passed in that state that aims to turn four blue House seats red, after facing leeriness by both the state legislature and the congressional delegation.

Once the legislature passes a new redistricting plan, “it’s the starting line, not the finishing line,” for the officials who need to hurriedly rework their plans for administering the election, said David Becker, a former Justice Department voting attorney who now advises election officials.

That could include verifying that millions of voters are properly coded for their new districts and restarting the candidate qualification process.

The current tussling comes after President Donald Trump already injected enormous chaos into this electoral cycle by convincing Texas to embark on an unprecedented round of mid-decade redistricting – a move that started a gerrymandering arms race between Republicans and Democrats.

“In the partisan war that we are facing that the Supreme Court just inflamed, the parties caught in the middle are the election officials and the voters,” Becker said, “They’re not going to be any winners here.”

Trump join pressure campaign against longtime critic

The seat of Memphis-area US Rep. Steve Cohen, the sole Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation and a major Trump critic, is now at risk with state lawmakers feeling the squeeze to draw him out of the district before an August primary.

In a social media post Thursday, Trump said he had spoken to the state’s GOP Gov. Bill Lee. Lee, he said, has pledged to “work hard to correct the unconstitutional flaw” in the state’s US House map. The president said other political leaders in the state also have agreed to take action.

A Lee spokesperson did not immediately respond to CNN’s inquiry. In a statement, Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton said: “We are reviewing the recent opinion as I have conversations with the White House and other individuals.”

Under Tennessee law, the governor or the majority of members in both chambers of the state’s General Assembly would have to call the legislature back into a special session to redraw the House map.

Attempts to slow-roll Louisiana’s rush to redraw a Black Democrat’s House seat

Now pending before the Supreme Court is a technical but potentially meaningful procedural question about how quickly that ruling will take effect in Louisiana.

The group of White voters who challenged the second Black district filed an emergency request late Wednesday urging the court to make its decision final immediately, rather than waiting the month it would normally take to formally send the case back to a lower court for action.

But the voting rights group who lost the case told the justices on Thursday that there is “no urgency” for the Supreme Court to implement its decision and warned that doing so would cause confusion during an election that is already underway. It urged the court to hold off on taking further action until the election is over.

The appeal over timing is pending before Justice Samuel Alito, who handles emergency cases rising from Louisiana, Texas and other states covered by the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals. It was also Alito who authored the 6-3 opinion striking down the state’s map.

Alito’s opinion Wednesday included no guidance on what should happen next in the case. In 2024, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court ruling striking down the state’s map. Either Alito or the broader court will have to decide whether that two-year-old order remains in effect or was effectively lifted by the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday.

Louisiana Rep. Cleo Fields, the Democrat whose district is at the center of the voting rights opinion, decried the move by state Republicans to suspend the primary.

“People are already voting,” Fields told CNN. “It adds insult to injury to come and say, ‘Your vote won’t be counted. We’re just going to change the districts. We’re going to stop the election.’”

A case over Mississippi’s judicial lines poses an early legal test

An early test to the Supreme Court ruling’s impact will be in Mississippi, where Black voters brought a successful Voting Rights Act challenge to the electoral boundaries for state supreme court seats. Proceedings in that case were under way this week to determine how a new judicial map should be drawn.

Senior District Judge Sharion Aycock has asked for additional briefs due next week on how the Supreme Court ruling affects the case.

An open question that election law scholars have been debating since the Supreme Court’s ruling is how it will apply in non-partisan elections.

Alito’s opinion sets up partisan gerrymandering as a defense that states can use to ward off VRA challenges. But because Mississippi’s judicial elections are non-partisan, that case could show how the new standard will work in non-partisan elections, which are common for local elected bodies.

Even before the ruling had come down, Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves had told lawmakers he’d call a special legislative session to address how the Supreme Court’s opinion affects the judicial plan.

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