Waylay Callais!

After much anticipation, the Supreme Court finally decided Louisiana v. Callais. (The Chief Justice pronounced it as waylay.) I have some preliminary thoughts.

First, more than five months elapsed from the oral argument in October till decision day. The longer this case dragged on, the harder it would be for Republican legislatures to redistrict. There was some speculation that the dissenters were dragging out the case to run out the clock. Are these insinuations accurate? Justice Alito’s majority opinion in somewhat unusual in that it barely engages with the dissent. There are a few paragraphs on the penultimate page of the opinion that address the dissent. This isn’t the sort of drafting process that required many opinions going back-and-forth for revisions. Moreover, there were no concurrences. The majority opinion had six clean votes. Indeed, I suspect Justice Alito circulated this draft shortly after conference. And I can’t imagine there was much disagreement between Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. Is five months an unusually long period of time for a 90-page decision when the majority doesn’t respond to the dissent? Not usually, but where there is an incentive on one side to go quick, the other side may not have been in a hurry. (I will leave aside the claim in Molly Hemmingway’s new book that the Dobbs dissenters refused to expedited the release of the opinion after the leak.) Let’s wait to see what the leaks reveal.

Second, I think back to Allen v. Milligan, which was decided a few weeks before SFFA. At the time, there was speculation that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh (mostly) ruled against Alabama to soften the blow of (largely) ending affirmative action. Barely three years later, the Court relies on SFFA to (arguably) scale back Milligan. On the surface at least, there is no daylight between Justice Alito and the Chief Justice. Then again, it may have been Roberts’s preference to not invalidate Section 2, to at least maintain the fiction of stare decisis. Remember, the Chief Justice knows to the decimal point what percentage of cases overrule precedents.

Third, this decision eliminates the Voting Rights Act asymmetry. Democrats will lose their bonus in conservative states. For the 2026 midterms, it is not clear how much of an impact this ruling will have. But in the long run, especially after the 2030 census, Callais will be significant. Still, I think it is shortsighted to think that political dynamics will not change. For the first time in generations, black and hispanic voters will live in districts where the winner is not preordained. Callais may shift how politicians on both sides of the aisle appeal to a demographic that historically has been neglected. Minority voters may even strategically vote in republican primaries to affect narrow races. As I often say, ignore all predictions that the sky will fall after a Supreme Court decision. Institutions can adapt to changed circumstances.

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