On September 23rd, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais on behalf of eight Louisiana state legislators, urging the Justices to strike down Louisiana’s congressional map under the Fifteenth Amendment.
The brief lays out the record in plain terms: “The legislative supporters admitted it—the challenged congressional map was drawn ‘on account of race.’” The district court agreed, making a factual finding that “race motivated the draw.”
“One hundred and fifty-five years after the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, this Court can complete the ‘unfinished work’ of the Fifteenth Amendment and end the allocation of power based on skin color,” the brief explains. Unlike the balancing tests required by the Fourteenth Amendment, “the simplicity and comprehensiveness of the Fifteenth Amendment provides the Court with a simpler path to decide this case.”
PILF notes that “if a legislative map was enacted with a racial purpose, it violates the Fifteenth Amendment.”
The racial intent behind the map was common knowledge in Baton Rouge. Lawmakers themselves openly declared that “race was the purpose, race was the aim, and power was to be allocated to a favored race.”
PILF President J. Christian Adams emphasized the gravity of those admissions: “Louisiana legislators said on the record that race was the driving force behind this map. The Court should seize this opportunity to restore the Constitution’s promise and put an end to race-based gerrymandering once and for all.”
The summary argument of the filed amicus brief patiently states:
“This case can be decided under the Fifteenth Amendment and not reach any other issue. No words in the Constitution were purchased with the staggering amount of blood and treasure as the Civil War Amendments were. American lives and fortunes were destroyed so that the promise of equality before law could become law. Black and white, North and South, free and slave, all suffered the chaos and carnage.”
There is a long and painful history of racial gerrymandering in the United States. After the Civil War and the brief period of Black political gains during Reconstruction, many Southern states redrew district lines to suppress Black voting power. These efforts coincided with poll taxes, literacy tests, and other Jim Crow laws designed to disenfranchise Black citizens.”
More recently, the 1990s saw a series of Supreme Court cases that reaffirmed the constitutional limits on race-based redistricting:
- Shaw v. Reno (1993): The Court struck down a North Carolina district drawn to concentrate Black voters into a single, oddly shaped district. While the intent was to increase minority representation, the bizarre shape suggested race was the predominant factor, violating the Equal Protection Clause.
- Miller v. Johnson (1995): Georgia’s 11th Congressional District was invalidated for similar reasons. It was drawn to create a majority-Black district but was so irregular that the Court found race had been used improperly as the primary criterion.
- Bush v. Vera (1996): Texas attempted to create majority-minority districts, but the Supreme Court ruled that the districts were racially gerrymandered and unconstitutional due to their contorted shapes.
Despite the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial gerrymandering and empowered federal oversight of district maps in states with histories of voter suppression, these tactics persist nearly 60 years later. As exemplified by the current Louisiana map under challenge, gerrymandering continues to be weaponized—often cloaked in legal complexity—to suppress voter rights and distort democratic representation.
This is not just a legal issue—it is a moral one. When maps are drawn to dilute the voices of communities based on race, we betray the very promise of equal citizenship. Unfortunately, racial gerrymandering is not a relic of the past; it is a present injustice that corrodes trust, deepens division, and denies dignity.
The Court now has a chance to affirm that our democracy does not belong to one race or party; it belongs to every citizen, equally. That promise must be more than words. It must be enforced.
Read the full amicus brief here.David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.