In the wake of Donald Trump’s first electoral win in 2016, a friend of mine, a gay progressive who doesn’t follow politics too closely, told me exasperatedly, “The Democrats should get rid of the Electoral College!” It was a coward move by a broken system, he felt, one that had handed power to a demagogue over the clear will of the majority. Democrats were scrambling for answers back then, just as they are now, with zero real solutions in sight.
The Electoral College is the reason Trump won in 2016. While many of us were taught in high school that it existed to guard against a demagogue rising to power, it did the exact opposite. It overturned the American people’s choice of Hillary Clinton, a center-left mainstream politician, and handed the presidency to someone whose platform seemed built almost entirely on hating immigrants.
The Electoral College proved itself to be all downside and no upside, unless you happen to be a Republican banking on it to keep your party in power. It is a clearly broken institution that makes no sense in the 21st century. It cannot even accomplish the one thing it was originally designed to do.
It is not going away anytime soon, either. Moving to a national popular vote would require three-quarters of state legislatures to ratify a constitutional amendment, and the states that benefit most from the current system will never vote to dismantle it. So we are stuck with it, like it or not.
I was thinking about all of this when I read that the Supreme Court recently ruled against states drawing congressional district maps that gave proportional representation to racial minorities. In the ruling, the conservative majority made it painfully clear: there is no path left for meaningful democratic reform. Any law that weakens the Republican Party’s structural advantages will be struck down as unconstitutional.
The case was Louisiana v. Callais, and it centered on Louisiana’s congressional map. Louisiana has six congressional seats and is almost exactly one-third Black, according to the 2020 Census. Proportional representation would mean two of those six districts should be majority-Black. But the state’s 2020 map included only one such district, which led to a lawsuit arguing that white voters had been given disproportionate influence.
After years of litigation, the conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled this week that the 1965 Voting Rights Act does not require proportional representation. They went further, arguing that the people asking for fair representation were actually the real racists for demanding a racial gerrymander. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, declaring that taking race into account at all is the problem.
The court’s reasoning was twisted in a very specific way. It said that breaking up minority communities across multiple districts to guarantee more Republican wins is acceptable because it counts as partisan gerrymandering, not racial gerrymandering. That distinction, critics say, is a fig leaf for something far more sinister.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie called the court’s logic “Orwellian.” He pointed to one line from Alito’s opinion that asked whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to a “very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”
this line from alito’s opinion, that the question before the court was “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination,” is truly orwellian
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) April 30, 2026 at 9:58 PM
In a follow-up post, Bouie added that it is “equal protection” to allow a state to obliterate a minority group’s representation entirely. The contradiction at the heart of the ruling, he argued, is not a legal nuance. It is a political outcome dressed up in constitutional language.
it is racial discrimination to try ensure that the representation of a minority group is roughly in line with its proportion of the state’s population. it is equal protection to allow a state to obliterate a minority group’s representation.
— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) April 30, 2026 at 9:59 PM
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, did not mince words. “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave,” she wrote. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act all but a dead letter.”
There are currently 61 Black people serving in the House of Representatives, a number that is roughly proportionate to Black Americans making up about 13% of the national population. But experts believe that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais will chip away at that representation in the coming redistricting cycles.
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, called the ruling an “outright power grab.” She said it was “about silencing Black voices, dismantling majority-Black districts, and rigging the maps so that politicians can choose their voters instead of the other way around.”
This ruling matters for LGBTQ+ rights as well. Black elected officials have, by and large, been among the strongest and most consistent supporters of LGBTQ+ equality in Congress. Reducing their numbers in the House is not a neutral outcome for queer communities.
This is far from the first ruling against the Voting Rights Act specifically, an overwhelmingly popular law passed by Congress under the broad powers of the 15th Amendment. The Court gutted another key provision of the Act back in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder. This week’s ruling is the next blow in a long and deliberate series.
So what can actually be done? That is the question that makes this situation feel genuinely hopeless. Any federal law that tries to fix gerrymandering can be struck down by this same Supreme Court. Constitutional amendments are completely off the table for the foreseeable future, because the states that profit from gerrymandering will simply refuse to ratify them. And even if a constitutional amendment somehow passed, a conservative court with an agenda can interpret it away to nothing, as we just watched them do this week.
Trump celebrated the ruling publicly and called it the “kind of decision” he had been waiting for. His Supreme Court, built with three justices he appointed, just destroyed the last meaningful guardrail against permanent Republican election dominance. Democrats are scrambling for a response, and so far, they have none.
As long as the right maintains extra structural representation in government, the entire system will tilt steadily toward inequality. That is not a partisan talking point. It is simply what the math now guarantees.
