Day: February 3, 2026

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections. It appears poised to abolish another pillar of the law.

In a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, the court appears ready to rule against Louisiana and its Black voters. In doing so, the court may well abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that prohibits any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for political clout for minority groups.

The dismantling of Section 2 would open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

There would be considerable historical irony if the court decides to use the 14th Amendment to provide the legal cover for reversing a generation of Black political progress in the South. Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

I am a historian who studies race and memory during the Civil War era. As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work may soon be undone by the current Supreme Court. The court, which heard oral arguments in the Louisiana case in October 2025, will release its decision by the end of June 2026.

Robert D. Bland does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

An unusually large majority of Americans agree that the recent scenes of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis are disturbing.

Federal immigration agents have deployed with weapons and tactics more commonly associated with military operations than with civilian law enforcement. The federal government has sidelined state and local officials, and it has cut them out of investigations into whether state and local law has been violated.

It’s understandable to look at what’s happening and reach a familiar conclusion: This looks like a slide into authoritarianism.

There is no question that the threat of democratic backsliding is real. President Donald Trump has long treated federal authority not as a shared constitutional set of rules and obligations but as a personal instrument of control.

In my research on the presidency and state power, including my latest book with Sidney Milkis, “Subverting the Republic,” I have argued that the Trump administration has systematically weakened the norms and practices that once constrained executive power – often by turning federalism itself into a weapon of national administrative power.

But there is another possibility worth taking seriously, one that cuts against Americans’ instincts at moments like this. What if what America is seeing is not institutional collapse but institutional friction: the system doing what it was designed to do, even if it looks ugly when it does it?

For many Americans, federalism is little more than a civics term – something about states’ rights or decentralization.

In practice, however, federalism functions less as a clean division of authority and more as a system for managing conflict among multiple governments with overlapping jurisdiction. Federalism does not block national authority. It ensures that national decisions are subject to challenge, delay and revision by other levels of government.

Dividing up authority

At its core, federalism works through a small number of institutional mechanics – concrete ways of keeping authority divided, exposed and contestable. Minneapolis shows each of them in action.

First, there’s what’s called “jurisdictional overlap.”

State, local and federal authorities all claim the right to govern the same people and places. In Minneapolis, that overlap is unavoidable: Federal immigration agents, state law enforcement, city officials and county prosecutors all assert authority over the same streets, residents and incidents. And they disagree sharply about how that authority should be exercised.

Second, there’s institutional rivalry.

Because authority is divided, no single level of government can fully monopolize legitimacy. And that creates tension. That rivalry is visible in the refusal of state and local officials across the country to simply defer to federal enforcement.

Instead, governors, mayors and attorneys general have turned to courts, demanded access to evidence and challenged efforts to exclude them from investigations. That’s evident in Minneapolis and also in states that have witnessed the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops against the will of their Democratic governors.

It’s easy to imagine a world where state and local prosecutors would not have to jump through so many procedural hoops to get access to evidence for the death of citizens within their jurisdiction. But consider the alternative.

If state and local officials were barred without consent from seeking evidence – the absence of federalism – or if local institutions had no standing to contest how national power is exercised there, federal authority would operate not just forcefully but without meaningful political constraint.

Third, confrontation is local and place-specific.

Federalism pushes conflict into the open. Power struggles become visible, noisy and politically costly. What is easy to miss is why this matters.

Federalism was necessary at the time of the Constitution’s creation because Americans did not share a single political identity. They could not decide whether they were members of one big community or many small communities.

In maintaining their state governments and creating a new federal government, they chose to be both at the same time. And although American politics nationalized to a remarkable degree over the 20th century, federal authority is still exercised in concrete places. Federal authority still must contend with communities that have civic identities and whose moral expectations may differ sharply from those assumed by national actors.

In Minneapolis it has collided with a political community that does not experience federal immigration enforcement as ordinary law enforcement.

The chaos of federalism

Federalism is not designed to keep things calm. It is designed to keep power unsettled – so that authority cannot move smoothly, silently or all at once.

By dividing responsibility and encouraging overlap, federalism ensures that power has to push, explain and defend itself at every step.

“A little chaos,” the scholar Daniel Elazar has said, “is a good thing!”

As chaos goes, though, federalism is more often credited for Trump’s ascent. He won the presidency through the Electoral College – a federalist institution that allocates power by state rather than by national popular vote, rewarding geographically concentrated support even without a national majority.

Partisan redistricting, which takes place in the states, further amplifies that advantage by insulating Republicans in Congress from electoral backlash. And decentralized election administration – in which local officials control voter registration, ballot access and certification – can produce vulnerabilities that Trump has exploited in contesting state certification processes and pressuring local election officials after close losses.

Forceful but accountable

It’s helpful to also understand how Minneapolis is different from the most well-known instances of aggressive federal power imposed on unwilling states: the civil rights era.

Then, too, national authority was asserted forcefully. Federal marshals escorted the Black student James Meredith into the University of Mississippi in 1962 over the objections of state officials and local crowds. In Little Rock in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in U.S. Army troops after Gov. Orval Faubus attempted to block the racial integration of Central High School.

Violence accompanied these interventions. Riots broke out in Oxford, Mississippi. Protesters and bystanders were killed in clashes with police and federal authorities in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama.

What mattered during the civil rights era was not widespread agreement at the outset – nationwide resistance to integration was fierce and sustained. Rather, it was the way federal authority was exercised through existing constitutional channels.

Presidents acted through courts, statutes and recognizable chains of command. State resistance triggered formal responses. Federal power was forceful, but it remained legible, bounded and institutionally accountable.

Those interventions eventually gained public acceptance. But in that process, federalism was tarnished by its association with Southern racism and recast as an obstacle to progress rather than the institutional framework through which progress was contested and enforced.

After the civil rights era, many Americans came to assume that national power would normally be aligned with progressive moral aims – and that when it was, federalism was a problem to be overcome.

Minneapolis exposes the fragility of that assumption. Federalism does not distinguish between good and bad causes. It does not certify power because history is “on the right side.” It simply keeps power contestable.

When national authority is exercised without broad moral agreement, federalism does not stop it. It only prevents it from settling quietly.

Why talk about federalism now, at a time of widespread public indignation?

Because in the long arc of federalism’s development, it has routinely proven to be the last point in our constitutional system where power runs into opposition. And when authority no longer encounters rival institutions and politically independent officials, authoritarianism stops being an abstraction.

Nicholas Jacobs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation