The Supreme Court Is Poised to Strike Down Race-Based Redistricting

Chronicles Magazine ^ | December 2025 | Stephen B. Presser

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Abortion, religion, and race were the three intractable constitutional law conundrums of the second half of the 20^th century. Back in the 1960s and ’70s, the justices of the Warren and Burger Supreme Courts felt compelled to step in and resolve them, though their constitutional warrant so to do was anything but clear.

As readers of this magazine are well aware, for decades American society has been roiled by what we are slowly coming to see as the Supreme Court’s unwarranted judicial audacity—if not impudence, arrogance, and illegitimacy. Since Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968, Republicans have been seeking to correct what they regard as the unwarranted aggrandizement of federal court intrusion into the prerogatives of state and local governments. Only as a result of Donald Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are we witnessing what may be a successful attempt to correct this glaring judicial error. 

The most prominent example of long-overdue constitutional correction is undoubtedly the overruling of Roe v. Wade (1973). This audacious Burger Court decision somehow found an unenumerated implicit constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), five of the Justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas) joined in an opinion that remarkably and candidly declared Roe was in clear error, and that, indeed, there simply was no such implicit right. Accordingly, the Court returned the question of the legality of abortion to the states, where, by the Constitution’s 10^th Amendment, it had actually always belonged. 

In the 19^th century and well into the 20^th, it was not unusual to encounter statements that ours was a Christian country, and several of our Framers, and one of...

[willk]

If only 🙏.

[Paladin2]

Conehead Barrett continues to be problematic...

[frank ballenger]

Fast Paced Race Based Erase Case.

Short Court Tort Thwart.

[napscoordinator]

Yeah. She let the Texas redistricting continue.

[kvanbrunt2]

The most significant court case will be the one that says, SCOTUS can’t legislate. that will never happen.

[suasponte137]

I hear we can pick up 19 seats if the GOP grabs its grapes and redistricts with the vigor that the Dems have done to us for decades.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Race based redistricting has a paradox. On one side, courts have ruled that it is wrong to put all black voters in the same district, so they will be close to being guaranteed a representative, because it *limits* how many representatives they can have.

But they have also ruled that dividing up the black voters into several districts is wrong, because this makes it likely that they will have no representatives at all.

About the only solution that has been proposed is that black votes should be weighed as worth more than white votes.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

So much for the “all men are created equal” thingy.

[Ex-Con777]

The Texas redistristicting was correcting the racial gerrymandering of the past, per the courts. The gop didn’t pick up 5 seats. It reclaimed 5 seats that were illegally taken from it.

California doesn’t grasp that concept.

EC

[piasa]

About time. If race -based questions weren’t allowed on future census forms that would be any better, and would make it harder for government and political parties to divide Americans into “manageable and exploitable” subgroups to set one against the others and vice versa.