In his opinion in Louisiana v. Callais last month, Justice Samuel Alito handed Republican lawmakers an all-but-ironclad defense to claims that an electoral map violates the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in 1965 to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. Under the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, Alito pointed out, lawmakers are free to use the redistricting process to protect their “partisan advantage”—and, he said, Voting Rights Act plaintiffs must not be allowed to “circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” In Alito’s mind, federal judges have a solemn responsibility to ensure that the Republican Party’s ongoing attempts to cement themselves in power in perpetuity are not derailed by Black people who want to participate in democracy.
In Callais, Alito thus emphasized that in order to prove that a map is a racial gerrymander rather than a partisan gerrymander, plaintiffs bear a “special” burden to “disentangle” race and politics to the satisfaction of this Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority. Given how infrequently state lawmakers are foolish enough to say things like “We are implementing this map with the specific intent to squeeze Black people out of electoral politics,” the test Alito created in Callais renders the promises of the Voting Rights Act more or less meaningless.
Throughout his opinion, Alito framed Callais as an “update” to the Court’s Voting Rights Act jurisprudence, necessary only to “realign” the law with constitutional principles. But the reality he glossed over, of course, is that in a country where 85 percent of Black voters cast their ballots for Democrats, race and politics cannot be “disentangled” from one another. Particularly in the South, where Section 2 stood as the last semi-functioning obstacle to the GOP’s increasingly aggressive redistricting efforts, diluting the voting strength of Democrats necessarily dilutes the voting strength of Black people. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in dissent, “any map with a majority-Black district will not be a map with all Republican seats.”
In this context, Alito’s opinion is best understood as a get-out-of-racism free card for his fellow Republicans as they strive to retain control of Congress in 2026 and beyond. Going forward, as long as these lawmakers remember to say that they merely sought to discriminate against Democratic voters, rather than against Black voters who happen to vote for Democrats, they can do (sorry for the legal jargon) whatever the fuck they want.
This sounds like it should be a simple enough task. But on Monday morning, South Carolina Republican Representative Ralph Norman failed to take the hint. During an interview with a right-wing media outlet, Norman, who is now running for governor, was asked about proposed changes to South Carolina’s congressional map, which Republicans have discussed redrawing in an effort to transform their current 6-to-1 advantage into a 7-to-0 shutout. Doing so would entail breaking up District 6, the state’s only majority-minority district. For the last 28 years, it has been represented in Congress by Representative Jim Clyburn, the state delegation’s only Democrat and only Black member.
And under the bright lights of live television, Norman slipped a little.
“Jim Clyburn—I like him personally, but he does not represent the rest of South Carolina, which is conservative,” Norman said. “His district is close to 47 percent African-American. And then 41 percent [white], with 6 percent makeup of Hispanics.”
Note the shift in Norman’s language: At the start of his thought, his argument is that the existence of Clyburn’s district is inconsistent with South Carolina’s “conservative” politics. But as evidence for his point, Norman does not assert that Clyburn’s district is too “liberal,” or too “Democratic.” His claim, instead, is that Clyburn’s district has too many Black people in it.
Rep. Ralph Norman: “Jim Clyburn, I like him personally, but he does not represent the rest of South Carolina, which is conservative. His district is close to 47% African American.” pic.twitter.com/nbMoAdu3Bm
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 11, 2026
For what it’s worth, Norman’s numbers are a little off—according to the most recent Census data, Clyburn’s district is about 44 percent Black and 43 percent white. (Those 47/41/6 numbers are what appear on the Wikipedia page for District 6, and what Google AI returns when I search for “South Carolina District 6 Black population.”) But Norman’s willingness to openly, enthusiastically talk about race at all is what gives away the game here. By the time he realized that he’d said the one thing that people like him are not supposed to say out loud, the best he could do was kind of awkwardly trail off before he arrived at the word “white.”
Norman’s goof perfectly illustrates Kagan’s point in her Callais dissent, which is that the Court’s decision to transform partisan gerrymandering into a shield against vote dilution claims makes it impossible for people of color to win Voting Rights Act cases. For all the effort the conservative justices put in to distinguishing between racial identity and partisan politics, in the real world, these concepts are so bound up with one another that Ralph Norman, a man who has a profound interest in maintaining this distinction, could not prevent himself from conflating them within the span of two sentences.
In his opinion in Callais, Alito argued that requiring people challenging electoral maps to “disentangle” race and politics would ensure that the “VRA’s noble goal” is not “perverted.” But he understood exactly what his decision permitted, and what it would unleash: a gleeful push in red states across the country to keep Republicans in power, and Black people out of elected office. Ralph Norman is as excited as Sam Alito about what Callais allows Republicans to accomplish. For a moment, he just forgot to be cool about it.
