May 1, 2026 - Pentagon's War Powers Pause

Sixty percent of the roughly 30,000 who voted in yesterday's poll said race should not be considered when drawing legislative boundary lines. I doubt I'd have gotten the same result if I'd asked whether you agree with the Supreme Court's Louisiana redistricting decision — but that's essentially what the majority says. Writing for a 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Alito held that race cannot be used to guarantee minority representation, while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to prove a Voting Rights Act violation. Whether any meaningful protection for minority voters survives remains to be seen.

The backstory: Louisiana has six congressional seats, and Black voters make up roughly a third of the population — yet for decades only one district gave them a realistic chance of electing their preferred candidate. After a federal court found that violated the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana redrew its map to include a second majority-Black district. Almost immediately, non-Black voters challenged that map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed, and in doing so rewrote the VRA standard — now requiring proof of intentional discrimination, not merely discriminatory effect. Justice Kagan's dissent called the new standard "well-nigh impossible" to meet and warned Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is now "all but dead-letter."

As NPR's Nina Totenberg reminded me yesterday, the ruling's reach extends beyond Congress to state legislatures, school boards, and city councils alike.

Final thought: this seems like a problem tailor-made for artificial intelligence. If we can agree on the criteria, let AI draw the maps — and take human mischief out of the equation.

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