A congressional redistricting frenzy is sweeping across the South this week, after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority last week slashed a key Voting Rights Act protection, triggering new efforts by Republicans to quickly rewrite U.S. House district maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee are the latest battlegrounds in a nearly year-long redistricting war pitting President Donald Trump and Republicans against Democrats. And as many as a dozen seats may be in play in the latest skirmishes.
With the GOP defending its razor-thin House majority in the midterms, at stake in this redistricting showdown is which party will control the House during the final two years of Trump’s second term in the White House.
All eyes are on Louisiana, which was the state whose congressional district map was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The justices reshaped the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act by ruling that race should not dictate the redrawing of legislative district maps.
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The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that its decision declaring Louisiana’s map unconstitutional should go into effect immediately, breaking with its usual procedure of waiting roughly a month before its opinions become official.
That clears the way for the GOP-controlled state legislature to begin the process of redrawing the map as early as this week. Last week, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, in the immediate aftermath of the high court’s ruling, delayed this month’s U.S. House primary elections.
Landry argued his executive order “ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map.”
Louisiana Republicans are aiming to erase one or both of the two Black-majority House seats, which are represented by Democrats.
But lawsuits filed by Democrats aim to block the push by Louisiana Republicans to redraw the maps.
Lawmakers in the Alabama legislature, where the GOP holds a supermajority in both chambers, began meeting on Monday to work on redistricting that may result in eliminating one or both of the state’s two blue-leaning U.S. House districts.
The special session was called by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey.
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But any new map passed by Alabama lawmakers will need to be greenlit by the Supreme Court. That’s because Alabama is currently prohibited by the high court from redistricting until 2030. It’s unclear if the court will lift its injunction.
Tennessee lawmakers begin meeting in a special session starting Tuesday to put together a new congressional district map that may erase the state’s only Democratic-controlled seat.
Republican Gov. Bill Lee spoke with Trump last week in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. Hours after the president said in a social media post that Lee “would work hard” to redraw Tennessee’s map, the governor called the special session.
“We owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters,” the governor wrote in a statement.
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It appears unlikely South Carolina will join Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee in implementing redistricting in time for the midterms.
A top aide to Republican Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina confirmed to Fox News Digital that it’s very unlikely the GOP-controlled state will enact congressional redistricting. “We do not anticipate the Governor calling a special session,” McMaster spokeswoman Michelle LeClair said.
Longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn is the only Democrat in South Carolina’s seven-person House delegation.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said late last week that the Supreme Court’s ruling won’t impact elections this year in Georgia, but that redistricting changes would come before the 2028 elections. Georgia holds its primary in two weeks.
But Trump is urging GOP states to take action regardless of whether they face time crunches due to upcoming primaries.
“We should demand that State Legislatures do what the Supreme Court says must be done,” the president wrote this past weekend in a social media post. “This is going to help us win elections!”
Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill passed last week by the GOP-dominated state legislature that redraws the red-leaning state’s congressional districts, adding four more right-leaning seats by eliminating districts currently controlled by Democrats.
Republicans currently control Florida’s U.S. House delegation by a 20-8 margin.
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The DeSantis bill signing came two weeks after voters in Virginia narrowly passed a referendum that, if it clears legal hurdles, will give the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature — rather than the current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election. It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.
But Virginia’s Supreme Court has yet to rule on a trio of cases contesting the new map.
Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.
The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.
When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.
But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.
Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.
That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.
The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.
Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.
But in blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.
And Republicans in Indiana’s Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House.
