On April 29th, 2026 the United States Supreme Court gave the decision for the case, Louisiana v. Callais, which ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map, which included two majority African American, and majority Democratic, districts, as unconstitutional, labeling them a “racial gerrymander, ” and therefore impermissible under the Fifteenth Amendment. The decision has been explained as a gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which allowed for the federal government to intervene in the redistricting process of states, especially those who had a history of discrimination against African Americans, to ensure equality in congressional representation opportunities. It also overruled the previous 2023 SCOTUS case Allen v. Milligan, where the Supreme Court posited its right to strike down district maps that violated the VRA, this time in Alabama. With this ruling, Louisiana went back to having only one majority-minority district, containing both Baton Rouge and New Orleans, while the rest of the districts were majority White and majority Republican. Beyond Louisiana, however, this decision, and other instances of political gerrymander, still constitutional, have played into the Republican strategy to redistrict states to provide an advantage in the 2026 midterms, which they are forecasted to lose, in technically legal moves, silencing African-American and other minority voters in the process, attacking two pillars of democracy at once. 

Judicial Independence and Constitutional Hardball

The American judicial system was designed in the Constitution to be insulated from the pressures of democracy’s faction politics, with lifetime appointment with good behavior, salaries that cannot be reduced during their time in office, and many of them appointed by legislature rather than elected (which only happens for some offices on the state level in certain states), so what explains its failure to check the creep of power both from the executive and from the party they belong to? Before answering, we can look towards other nations for similar examples of the independent judiciary’s subjugation. In Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the Supreme Court, packed with his supporters, the chavistas, an opposition legislative electoral victory was rendered useless through the court’s dismantling of opposition legislation under the guise of unconstitutionality and the weakening of the legislature. Similar accounts happened in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and the failure of a democratically elected parliament in post-Arab Spring Tunisia to fill their highest court with appointees, has led to now president Kais Saied, a former constitutional lawyer himself, to fill it his own supporters to, transforming Tunisia into a hyperpresidential autocracy after the Arab Spring’s initial successes in the country. The judiciary has been used to arrest opponents in Putin’s Russia, and more recently in Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, where CHP party members have been imprisoned over trumped up charges.

President Trump has used his two terms to both expand the power of the executive, himself, and to damage the norms that guide American democracy, two of which, as identified by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, are forbearance and mutual toleration. While the breakdown of mutual toleration, accepting one’s political opponent as a valid competitor, has been a staple of Republican strategy since Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution, it has led to the undermining of forbearance, in which the Republican Party has used all of its constitutional powers to attempt to gain the upper hand against their political rivals, or playing ‘constitutional hardball.’ For the judiciary’s case, we start in March of 2016, in which then president Barack Obama first sought to nominate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court to succeed Antonin Scalia’s vacancy, but was blocked by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s appeal to wait until the November 2016 presidential election had been decided and to let the winner fill the vacancy instead. Neil Gorsuch was instead appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017, by 2016 election-winner Donald Trump. He would go on to fill two more vacancies in his first term, appointing Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in 2018 and 2020 respectively, shifting the Supreme Court’s ideological balance to a 6-3 conservative lead, which was a point of tension when Obama sought to nominate centrist to liberal Garland to replace conservative Scalia. While appointing SCOTUS Justices is not any sort of constitutional hardball, the protection of conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito’s ‘gifts’ worth millions of dollars from prominent right-leaning donors to cement a decision like Louisiana v. Callais is. 

National Unity and the Position of African Americans

In 1970, Dankwart Rustow advocated that the condition necessary for democracy was not necessarily a civic culture or a certain economic development level, but instead was a level of national unity between its citizens, which can be interpreted as a level of understanding and acceptance of who is and who is not included in the nation. This article comes out shortly after the institutional political acceptance of African Americans across all of America with the death of the Jim Crow Era South and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and its related Voting Rights Acts. With this, a more multiracial democracy was created, and a relatively single party regime across the South was ended, but so too were many of the norms of mutual toleration in politics, with parties once united in this racial discrimination. While there have always been segregationists and racists in American politics, they have been provided with a new figurehead in the MAGA movement, a populist and more anti-democratic brand than the traditional Republican establishment. 

With some who seek to exclude African Americans from political participation, and from the body politic all together given a place in governance, the national unity that once united parties, but divided our democracy between its citizens, is given a way to be reborn. With the limiting of congressional representation through gerrymandering, and blocking of their chosen political parties, the exclusion of African Americans from politics alienates them once more from the American nation, upsetting the racial balance upon which our democracy has rested on for decades, and has taken centuries to construct.