SCOTUS hands national Republicans the legal tools to do exactly what Texas did in 2025: disenfranchise Black and Latino Americans without recourse
AUSTIN, TEXAS — Texas House Minority Leader Rep. Gene Wu today issued the following statement after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on partisan lines in Louisiana v. Callais, which rewrites Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require proof of intentional racial discrimination and effectively shields racially-gerrymandered maps from legal challenges:
“In December, I said the Supreme Court’s stay of our injunction against Texas’ racially-gerrymandered maps was a harbinger of the end of the Voting Rights Act. Today, the Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court made it official. They gutted the most important civil rights law of the last century, and they handed Republican legislatures across the country a permission slip to follow Texas’ lead — cracking and packing Black and Latino voters into districts where their voices won’t matter.
“Texas House Democrats know exactly what this looks like, because we lived it. When Greg Abbott rammed through Donald Trump’s racist mid-decade gerrymander last August, we broke quorum and left the state to stop it. We faced arrest warrants, lawsuits, bomb threats, and financial penalties. We did it because that map dismantles majority-minority congressional districts and silences millions of Black and Latino Texans. We did it because we believed in the Voting Rights Act and had confidence in the law and the courts that enforce it.
“Today, the Supreme Court told us those courts are no longer in that business. Under this ruling, a state can openly admit it drew its districts to protect incumbents of one party, and that admission becomes a defense rather than evidence of wrongdoing. A state can demand its critics produce a map that satisfies every partisan goal the legislature dreamed up, or lose. According to this Court, a century of voter suppression in places like Texas and Louisiana is ancient history, no longer relevant to lawmaking and redistricting today.
“Our fight against Trump and Abbott’s Texas gerrymander will be harder now. But harder is not impossible, and we are not going anywhere.
“We started a national fight when we broke quorum last year, and other states have answered. California has passed Prop 50, and Virginians passed their redistricting amendment just last week. Today’s ruling is a call to every state with the power to act — finish what we started together. Other states should move with the urgency this moment demands, because Republicans certainly will.
“The fight to stop Republican racial gerrymandering continues — in the courts, in Congress which has the power to restore the rights that the Supreme Court took today, and at the ballot box where Texans will get the final word. We will keep fighting on all three fronts.”