Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS/
The Supreme Court "broke democracy" after its latest seismic ruling set off a tidal wave of gerrymandering efforts, and according to a new analysis from Vox, it did so by "saying the quiet part out loud" when it would have best served the world by staying quiet.
In a ruling last week, the conservative majority court effectively struck down a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to eliminate "majority-minority" congressional districts, under the guise of strictly partisan-based gerrymandering. This ruling swiftly led several Republican-led states to plot abrupt new redistricting efforts, which critics warn could lead to a historic wipeout of black lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Democrats, meanwhile, began plotting a counterattack with more of their gerrymandering.
"Meanwhile, lefty groups are already plotting to overcome rigged Republican maps with equally rigged Democratic ones," Vox legal journalist Ian Milihiser explained. "Fair Fight Action, an advocacy group founded by former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has a plan to turn 10 US House seats blue right away — and to turn as many as 22 districts into gerrymandered Democratic seats if Democrats pick up enough seats in the right state legislatures."
Prior to this latest ruling and others, Millhiser explained further, the Supreme Court had "maintained a kind of strategic ambiguity," whereby it never struck down a gerrymandered map for being too overtly partisan, but "also kept open the possibility that it might strike down a truly egregious gerrymander in the future." That dynamic "mattered," because before this latest ruling, lawmakers tended not to go as far as they might have liked with their rigged redistricting, but now, the John Roberts conservative court has given "bad actors explicit license to engage in anti-social behavior, when the Court had previously kept the law more ambiguous."
"Sometimes, in other words, the best thing that the Court can do is say nothing at all," Millhiser surmised. "It could have continued to uphold individual gerrymanders without stating definitively that there are no rules."
He continued: "Now there is an arms race where states where states throughout the country are drawing mid-cycle gerrymanders. States like California or Virginia that previously banned gerrymandering are bypassing those bans to participate in this arms race. Unless the Supreme Court changes course, it now seems inevitable that those bans will be permanently repealed, and that every state will redraw its maps whenever control of the state government changes hands — assuming that such a thing is still possible in an era when state lawmakers can redraw their own maps to lock themselves in power."
The Roberts' Court, he concluded, should have realized it was best to keep some things close to the chest, and in other words, "shut up." Instead, their "big mouths" have left American democracy in a spiraling state of "turmoil."