It's All Politics

Well, they did it: On Tuesday evening, the Supreme Court found a way to make Callais worse. They actually found several: they made an absolute partisan joke of the “Purcell principle”; they flagrantly, ostentatiously violated their own prior opinion in the long Alabama litigation in which they issued Tuesday’s order; they rewarded Alabama’s defiance of federal court orders; and they offered so very little in the way of reasoning as to make their action difficult to interpret as anything but lawless partisanship. But most importantly—and here finally we come to my topic in this blog post—SCOTUS did it by making the key implausible claim at the heart of Louisiana v. Callais, about racially polarized voting, just slightly sharper and more indefensible than it already was.The official view of the Roberts Court is now as follows. If every single Black person votes one way, and every single white person votes the opposite way, in every single election, forever, that is not even relevant to…