In 1986, Robert Cortez “Bobby” Scott, then a state Senator in Virginia, ran for election to the Commonwealth’s First Congressional District seat against incumbent Representative Herb Bateman (R-VA), losing in a landslide, 56% to 44%. In the redistricting which followed the 1990 Census, the state legislature, at the direction of the federal Department of Justice, reapportioned the Third District into a “majority-minority,” meaning majority black, district, just for Mr Scott. The new Third District ran along the James River, from Newport News to Richmond, packing in heavily black areas. It worked: Mr Scott stomped Republican Dan Jenkins 79%-21%. Mr Scott is still in the United States House of Representatives, having served since January 3, 1993, 32 years, 9 months, and 13 days ago.

But, there was another election result in 1992. Mr Bateman barely won re-election in the reconfigured First District against newcomer Andy Fox, with barely over 50% of the vote. Mr Fox ran against Mr Bateman in 1992, but his time the Republican won in a landslide, because so many solidly Democratic voters had been peeled away from the First and placed into the Third District.

It’s simple: A Republican congressman who was at least subject to a strong Democratic challenger now had his seat in the “safe Republican” category, and Mr Bateman held that seat until his death on September 11, 2000. My family and I were living in Hampton, Virginia, in the First District, during all of this, which is why I remember it so well.

Now comes Louisiana v. Callais, a case before the United States Supreme Court concerning how much legislatures can use race in consideration of redistricting. The Louisiana state legislature, seeing the previous result in Allen v Milligan, 2023, believed that a second majority black district needed to be created to comply with the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 52 USC §10301. But, to do that, the state came up with a district shaped like a snake, wholly unlike any definition of being compact.

Naturally, some state residents sued. Allen v Milligan allowed this kind or racial gerrymandering, but Louisiana v Callais threatens to undo that. Naturally, the left are up in arms, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went so far as to claim that black Americans are “disabled” when it comes to voting.

Jackson noted that the majority opinion in a 2023 Supreme Court ruling — which found Alabama unlawfully diluted the voting power of black people in the state — “used the word ‘disabled’” to describe voters subject to “processes [that] are not equally open.”

There is an interesting point that is being mostly ignored in all of the debates. Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued before the Court:

(Associate Justice Samuel) Alito suggested that racially polarized voting could easily be identified through statistical analysis, and it could be seen whether White Democrats vote for Black Democrats at a lower rate, for instance.

At which point Miss Nelson stepped right into the trap.

Nelson told him that White Democrats were not voting for Black candidates — whether they were Democrats or not. She said there was no question that even if there is some correlation, that race was the driving factor.

In other words, Miss Nelson was arguing that Louisiana voters, exercising their free choices, were not voting correctly. In a partisan climate in which the Democrats have been arguing about racial ‘equity’ in terms which seem very much like a zero-sum game, the arguments for black empowerment seem to be made in terms in which gains for black Americans concomitantly entail losses for white Americans. But whatever their partisan and philosophical reasons, our system is predicated upon a secret ballot and the right of the voters to choose to vote however they wish.

There is another, even more pernicious assumption behind all of this. In a country which the equal protection of the laws is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment, the arguments of Miss Nelson are, in effect, that black citizens cannot be represented by white congressmen, and that includes the notion that white citizens cannot be represented by black congressmen. Our system of representation, in our cities and states as well as in Congress, is that our representatives represent all of the people withing the bounds of their districts; the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued against the foundational guarantees of our representative democracy.