(A)Political - May 2nd

Good morning everyone,

A huge week on the Hill. Let’s find out why!

The Supreme Court delivered a major decision this week that allows states to redistrict ahead of midterms. The President has decided to pull 5,000 troops from Germany following a widening rift with Chancellor Merz. Trump has now raised tariffs on E.U. vehicles again to 25% in ongoing trade disputes.

• SCOTUS Overrules Voting Rights Act

• The Pentagon Announces 5,000 U.S. Troops To Withdraw From Germany

• Trump Escalates Tariffs On E.U. Vehicles

SCOTUS Overrules Voting Rights Act

_{By: Atlas}

The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Louisiana's congressional map and sharply curtailed the reach of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ruling 6-3 that the state's second majority-Black district amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and resetting the legal framework that has governed minority voting rights cases for nearly four decades.

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais — written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — reverberated through Washington and state capitals within hours of its release. The Florida Legislature voted along party lines that same afternoon to adopt a new congressional map projected to flip as many as four Democratic seats. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, and Missouri publicly called for new maps. Estimates from both parties suggest the ruling could produce a net swing of as many as 12 to 19 House seats toward Republicans across the South over the next two election cycles.

"The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race," Alito wrote, holding that Louisiana's use of race in drawing its second majority-Black district was not justified by a "compelling interest" and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for herself and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent, called the decision "this latest chapter in the majority's now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act." She forewent the customary "respectfully" before "I dissent."

The legal reset

The ruling does more than dispose of one Louisiana map. It substantially rewrites the legal architecture that has governed Section 2 redistricting cases since Thornburg v. Gingles in 1986.

Three changes are central. First, plaintiffs alleging vote dilution can no longer submit "illustrative" or "demonstration" maps that maximize the number of majority-minority districts; alternative maps must comply with all of a state's race-neutral districting criteria, including its partisan goals. Second, plaintiffs must now disentangle race from partisanship when proving racial bloc voting — showing different voting patterns between Black and white voters is no longer sufficient if the divergence tracks party preference. Third, the "totality of circumstances" analysis at the heart of Gingles must now focus on present-day intentional racial discrimination rather than on historical patterns or generalized "societal effects."

Alito argued in the majority opinion that Gingles itself had been wrongly reasoned. "Gingles was decided at a time when this Court often paid insufficient attention to the language of statutory provisions, and Justice Brennan's opinion for the Court followed this pattern," he wrote.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which as amended by Congress in 1982 explicitly states that "nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population," now reaches, in effect, only intentional racial discrimination — a standard the Supreme Court had previously articulated in Mobile v. Bolden in 1980 before Congress responded with the 1982 amendments.

Kagan, in her dissent, argued that the majority's framework rendered Section 2 "all but a dead letter." She wrote that plaintiffs alleging vote dilution would now find it "nearly impossible" to succeed in court and warned of "grave" consequences. "A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split — 'cracked' is the usual term — so that it loses all its electoral influence," she wrote.

Immediate political fallout

The ruling came down as the redistricting wars that have consumed the past year of American politics were already running hot. President Donald Trump's mid-decade redistricting push began last summer, when he persuaded Texas Republicans to redraw their map to target five Democratic incumbents. California voters then approved a counter-map projected to net Democrats five seats. Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio have since redrawn maps in favor of Republicans. Last week, Virginia voters approved a redistricting amendment that, if it survives court challenges, could shift the state's House delegation from a 6-5 Democratic split toward a 10-1 Democratic advantage.

Within hours of Wednesday's ruling, Florida's Republican-controlled legislature approved a new map drawn by Governor Ron DeSantis aimed at flipping the seats of Democratic Representatives Kathy Castor, Darren Soto, Jared Moskowitz, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Senator Marsha Blackburn, who is running for governor of Tennessee, called on the state legislature to convene a special session to redraw Tennessee's 7-2 Republican map into an 8-1 split by eliminating the majority-Black Memphis district held by Representative Steve Cohen. Senator Tommy Tuberville called publicly for Alabama Republicans to vacate the federal court order locking in the state's current map. Representative Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican running for governor, urged a redraw of the majority-Black Sixth District.

The principal hurdle is timing. Several Southern states have primaries scheduled for May or have already begun mailing absentee ballots. Louisiana — the state at the center of the case — has a primary on May 16, with early voting beginning Saturday. Candidates have been campaigning for months under the now-invalidated lines. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told reporters Wednesday that lawmakers had not decided whether to attempt a fresh map in time for November. "We have, as you know, a primary coming up in about two weeks," Johnson said. "So we'll see if the state legislature deems it appropriate to go in and draw new maps."

Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said immediate redistricting would be "enormously disruptive and chaotic." Most analysts expect the more consequential changes to play out ahead of 2028 rather than November 2026.

The case below

The case had a long and unusually tangled procedural history. After the 2020 census, Louisiana initially adopted a six-seat congressional map with one majority-Black district, producing a 5-1 Republican advantage. A federal judge, applying Gingles, ordered the state to add a second majority-Black district. The legislature complied in 2024, drawing a new district running along the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge. White voters then sued, arguing the redrawn map was itself a racial gerrymander.

The case reached the Supreme Court once before in 2024, when the justices sent it back to Louisiana. A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court subsequently struck down the redrawn map as racially gerrymandered, setting up Wednesday's ruling. Janai Nelson, president of the Legal Defense Fund, who argued the case before the Supreme Court on behalf of Black voters, called the decision "a day of infamy for the court" and "a day of devastation for our democracy."

The Trump administration sided with the white voters who challenged the map. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, called it "perhaps one of the most important developments in decades in Voting Rights Act jurisprudence." Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the court had "ended Louisiana's long-running nightmare of federal courts coercing the state to draw a racially discriminatory map."

Civil rights organizations responded sharply. The NAACP described the ruling as "a direct attack on Black voters" and "a betrayal." Martin Luther King III, whose father led the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march that helped produce the Voting Rights Act, called the decision "not simply a legal setback, but a moral indictment that reflects a continued retreat from the promise of equal justice."

What changes, and what does not

The ruling does not formally overturn the Voting Rights Act, and several of its bedrock prohibitions remain in force. Literacy tests, poll taxes, property qualifications, and overt voter intimidation remain unlawful under federal statute. The Fifteenth Amendment's ban on intentional racial discrimination in voting is undisturbed.

What changes is the practical reach of Section 2 as a tool for forcing states to draw majority-minority districts. Under the new framework, plaintiffs face significantly higher evidentiary burdens at every stage of a vote-dilution case. Race-conscious remedies survive only where plaintiffs can show present-day intentional discrimination by the state, controlling for partisan affiliation, and where any alternative map satisfies all of the state's other districting criteria.

Senator Cory Booker called the ruling "another evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act." Senator Raphael Warnock described it as "yet another assault on voting rights from the same Supreme Court that hobbled the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder" — a reference to the 2013 decision that struck down the act's preclearance formula. Senator Josh Hawley said the ruling reinforced what he called "the right and appropriate" rule that states "cannot draw districts on the basis of race unless there is the tightest of connections to the harms identified by the Voting Rights Act."

Whether and how quickly Republican-led states actually redraw their maps will determine the immediate impact on the November midterms, which Republicans are entering with a 217-212 House majority, one independent, and five vacancies. The longer-term impact — on the 2028 election, on state legislative maps, and on local redistricting across the South — is likely to be far broader. As Brennan Center redistricting expert Kareem Crayton put it Wednesday, "The court has just added more chaos to a system that's already chaotic."

The ruling adds another redistricting front to a year that has already been defined by them. The 2026 election will now be fought, in significant measure, over maps that did not yet exist at the start of the week.

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