{"id":2599326,"date":"2026-05-06T08:37:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T12:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/dont-overlook-justice-clarence-thomas-concurrence-in-racial-gerrymandering-case\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T08:50:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T12:50:02","slug":"dont-overlook-justice-clarence-thomas-concurrence-in-racial-gerrymandering-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/dont-overlook-justice-clarence-thomas-concurrence-in-racial-gerrymandering-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Makes Case For Purging Court&#8217;s Race-Based Decisions"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fdont-overlook-justice-clarence-thomas-concurrence-in-racial-gerrymandering-case%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2599326&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>*Louisiana v. Callais* is presented as a major shift against <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/shocking-wrong-democrats-fume-after-supreme-court-sides-with-republicans-on-voting-map-issue\/\" title=\"\u2018Shocking\u2019 \u2018Wrong\u2019: Democrats Fume After Supreme ... Sides With Republicans On ... Map Issue\">race-based districting<\/a>: the Supreme Court held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act protects voters from racial discrimination, rather than requiring states to create race-driven gerrymanders as a \u201cfix\u201d for past discrimination. the article says the decision also continues the Roberts Court\u2019s pattern of rejecting \u201canti-racism\u201d policies implemented through court-mandated racial engineering.<\/p>\n<p>Though, it argues the ruling doesn\u2019t fully discard the underlying precedent that <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >enabled vote-dilution\/districting challenges<\/a>. It focuses on Justice Clarence Thomas\u2019s short, provocative concurrence (joined only by Justice Neil Gorsuch), reminding readers of his older view: to achieve true constitutional colorblindness, courts should go further than narrowing gerrymander rules-they should rethink or abandon the broader body of jurisprudence that, in his view, has distorted the VRA into authorizing proportional representation by race.<\/p>\n<p>The article explains Thomas\u2019s statutory argument from his earlier *Holder v.Hall* concurrence: Section 2\u2019s language about discriminatory \u201cvoting qualification[s]\u201d or \u201cstandard[s], practice[s], or procedure[s]\u201d was meant to address access to the ballot, not the drawing of district lines that affect the \u201cweight\u201d of votes. He contends that later cases wrongly interpreted the Act to regulate how political power is portioned among racial groups, forcing courts to make inherently political judgments about what an \u201cundiluted\u201d vote is and what districting arrangement should best produce it.<\/p>\n<p>it claims Thomas sees these rulings as leading to \u201cpolitical apartheid\u201d-a system where judges effectively steer elections by race,dividing the country into racial electoral \u201chomelands\u201d and defining minority representation in terms of race rather than voters. While the article praises Alito\u2019s attempt in *Louisiana v. Callais* to better align precedent with the VRA\u2019s text and the Constitution, it suggests Thomas\u2019s concurrence still calls for a deeper reckoning about both race-based election rules and the judiciary\u2019s role in drawing them.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In <em>Louisiana v. Callais<\/em>, the Supreme Court struck a major blow against <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/sneaking-past-scotus-california-dems-attempt-affirmative-action-workaround\/\" title=\"California Democrats are trying to find a way around the Supreme ...&#039;s ruling on affirmative ...ion.\">race-based policymaking<\/a>, holding that the law protects voters from discrimination, rather than mandating that states create racial gerrymanders as an ostensible corrective to discrimination. The decision builds on a string of cases whereby the Roberts Court has distinguished itself by rightly opposing present \u201canti-racism\u201d as a remedy for past racism \u2014 with <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/DemocracyDocket\/status\/2049491955642417548\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">potentially<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/AAGDhillon\/status\/2049963327116169424?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">massive<\/a> political implications.<\/p>\n<p>Yet as righteous as <em>Louisiana v. Callais <\/em>is, it modifies legal precedent, rather than jettisoning it. And in a terse but provocative two-page concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, hearkening back to an underappreciated opinion of his from some 32 years ago, argues that to achieve constitutional colorblindness the court must go further: Instead of just rolling back racial gerrymanders, it should jettison the entire corpus of fundamentally corrupted jurisprudence that spawned the pernicious practice.<\/p>\n<p>The landmark <em>Louisiana <\/em>case, and past rulings, have centered fundamentally on the court\u2019s approach to challenges to political maps and districting schemes as racially discriminatory under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The court has done so in part by developing tests concerning geography, demographic makeup, voting patterns, and the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/uscode.house.gov\/view.xhtml?path=\/prelim@title52\/subtitle1&#038;edition=prelim\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">totality of circumstances<\/a>\u201d to determine whether such maps or schemes pass legal muster \u2014 weighing disparate impact above discriminatory intent. Based on precedent and past Justice Department pressure, primarily Southern states have taken to drawing majority-minority districts \u2014 that is, racial gerrymanders purportedly benefitting minorities \u2014 to preempt challenges to their maps as dilutive and therefore discriminatory.<\/p>\n<p>That is what Louisiana did in adding a second majority-minority district to its six-district political map \u2013 only for that map itself to be challenged as an unconstitutional gerrymander. The court held in <em>Louisiana v. Callais <\/em>that indeed the map was unlawful. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, found that while VRA <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/crt\/section-2-voting-rights-act\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Section 2<\/a> ironically can provide a compelling reason for race-based districting, it did not require Louisiana to do so. The court\u2019s revised reading of the VRA raised the threshold for challenging a map\u2019s constitutionality under its previously established standards, focusing on \u201cintentional discrimination\u201d over disparate impact \u2014 accounting in part for increased minority voter participation and representation in the South.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Thomas\u2019 Concurrence<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Justice Thomas, joined solely by Justice Neil Gorsuch, concurred in the opinion. But Thomas argued that the court has approached the VRA in a fundamentally flawed way, and, notwithstanding its <em>Louisiana <\/em>ruling, has consequently promoted a perverse system of proportional racial representation. He would dispense with new interpretations or updated tests. To end the \u201cdisastrous misadventure\u201d that has seen the court drive \u201clegislatures and courts to \u2018systematically divid[e] the country into electoral districts along racial lines,\u2019\u201d Thomas says judges should get out of the business of entertaining districting and other challenges under the VRA altogether.<\/p>\n<p>The quoted text comes from the justice\u2019s concurrence in <a href=\"https:\/\/supreme.justia.com\/cases\/federal\/us\/512\/874\/case.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Holder v. Hall<\/em><\/a>, an opinion Thomas invoked in his <em>Louisiana<\/em> concurrence. The 1994 <em>Holder<\/em> case concerned whether under Section 2, plaintiffs could challenge the size of a single-member county commission for diluting minority votes. In a splintered ruling, the court found they could not.<\/p>\n<p>There, Thomas, joined only by Justice Antonin Scalia, explained why the court should not permit such a challenge \u2014 an explanation that applies to today\u2019s districting cases. And he detailed why the associated rulings were so detrimental to our constitutional order and body politic \u2014 arguments that remain relevant with precedent persisting, even if now in modified form.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Section 2 Does Not Cover Districting<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, Justice Thomas recounted, to eliminate discriminatory practices that kept blacks in the segregated South from being able to register and vote. Section 2 holds that citizens shall not be denied the right to vote on account of race through any discriminatory \u201cvoting qualification,\u201d \u201cprerequisite to voting,\u201d or \u201cstandard, practice, or procedure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In Justice Thomas\u2019s straightforward yet apparently radical reading, Section 2 does not cover districting. The relevant terms, \u201cstandard, practice, or procedure,\u201d Justice Thomas wrote some three decades ago, \u201creach only state enactments that limit citizens\u2019 access to the ballot.\u201d \u201cDistricting systems and electoral mechanisms that may affect the \u2018weight\u2019 given to a ballot duly cast and counted are simply beyond the purview of the Act,\u201d he asserted. And if Congress had wanted to amend the Act to cover vote dilution, it could have done so.<\/p>\n<p>Thomas made these arguments in an extensive analysis of the statute, establishing that the court twisted itself in knots, eliding the law\u2019s text, and relying on a selective reading of legislative history to not only use the VRA to adjudicate vote dilution cases, but as a \u201cdevice for regulating, rationing, and apportioning political power among racial and ethnic groups.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The kinds of judgments the Supreme Court undertook based on its expansive reading of the VRA, Thomas argued, reflected that the court had erred from almost the beginning. Dating back to 1969, the court interpreted the VRA to encompass practices and processes beyond registering and voting, including ones that might be deemed \u201cdilutive.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Forcing Political Questions<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>This forced the justices to answer expressly political questions. They had to define what an \u201cundiluted\u201d vote would look like, and then what the best system was to achieve it. The court would rule on whether single-member or multi-member districts better represented minorities; and whether the extent of group representation hinges on the \u201c<em>influence<\/em> [it has]  over a greater number of seats, or <em>control <\/em>over a lesser number of seats.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The court necessarily would also have to rule not only on \u201chow\u201d representatives are elected to represent minorities, but \u201chow many\u201d such representatives must be elected as a proportion of all seats.<\/p>\n<p>These were \u201cquestions of political philosophy, not questions of law,\u201d Justice Thomas charged, and they were ones that went \u201cbeyond the ordinary sphere of judges.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Once the court waded into these matters, Thomas found, it landed on a theory premised on the view that members of common racial or ethnic groups \u201cmust all think alike on important matters of public policy and must have their own \u2018minority preferred\u2019 representatives holding seats in elected bodies if they are to be considered represented at all.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2><strong>\u2018Political Apartheid\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>To Thomas\u2019 chagrin, the court would effectively endorse the idea that combatting discrimination required permitting the practice of engineering of districts to ensure roughly proportional representation by race. \u201c[W]e have assigned federal courts the task of ensuring that minorities are assured their \u2018just\u2019 share of seats,\u201d including through \u201cdrawing majority-minority single-member districts,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n<p>By \u201csystematically dividing the country into electoral districts along racial lines,\u201d the justice lamented, the courts had participated in \u201can enterprise of segregating the races into political homelands that amounts, in truth, to nothing short of a system of \u2018political apartheid.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe clear premise of the system is that geographic districts are merely a device to be manipulated to establish \u2018black representatives\u2019 whose real constituencies are defined, not in terms of the voters who populate their districts, but in terms of race,\u201d Thomas thundered.<\/p>\n<p>These contemptible consequences, he said, including the racial polarization that they would generate, flowed naturally from the court\u2019s jurisprudence. The court therefore should consider whether the mess it had made required a \u201csystematic reexamination\u201d of its interpretation of the VRA.<\/p>\n<p>Justice Alito\u2019s opinion in <em>Louisiana v. Callais <\/em>seeks to better harmonize this arguably flawed precedent with the VRA\u2019s text, the Constitution, and practical reality \u2014 including the laudable decline in \u201centrenched racial discrimination\u201d in America.<\/p>\n<p>That opinion took courage, given the vicious opposition the court faced, and the blowback it knew it was likely to engender by potentially threatening a dozen or so blue racially gerrymandered districts in red states.<\/p>\n<p>And the opinion may well achieve the goals sought by Justice Thomas.<\/p>\n<p>But his concurrence some three decades earlier demands another look. It suggests a further Voting Rights Act reckoning is still needed, not only to purge race-based policy from our electoral system, but to restore the proper role of the judiciary itself.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court curbed race-based districting, holding the VRA protects voters from discrimination-not requiring states to create racial gerrymanders<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":698,"featured_media":2599327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/50537145551_517ea69296_k-e1777919847207.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[33274,39262,35277,4431,38587],"class_list":["post-2599326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-civil-rights","tag-court-decisions","tag-judicial-reform","tag-legal","tag-race-discrimination"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/50537145551_517ea69296_k-e1777919847207.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/698"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2599326"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2599333,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599326\/revisions\/2599333"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2599327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2599326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2599326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2599326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}