Joel Bellman, a former editorial and op-ed writer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and an award-winning radio editorial and documentary producer, served for 26 years as press deputy to three Los Angeles County Supervisors.
You cannot overstate the seismic impact on American politics – all the way down to local politics – of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which tossed out a Louisiana redistricting plan essentially because it disadvantaged white voters.
The case decided the fate of a second Black-majority congressional district that Louisiana was ordered to create by a federal court in 2022. Two years later, a group of white voters led by Bert Callais, a 2020 election denier and Jan. 6 protester, persuaded a three-judge panel that the “remedy for a remedy” was itself discriminatory against “non-African American” voters. Louisiana appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in a 6-3 decision, the Roberts court reinterpreted — or in its own words, “properly” interpreted — Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to preclude requiring states to redraw their district lines unless it can be shown that a state “drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”
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This decision comes after an unsigned order by the court last month allowing Texas to proceed with its partisan mid-decade redistricting, reversing a lower court’s finding of an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Together, these Supreme Court decisions are an open invitation for more partisan gerrymanders at the expense of voters of color. Harmeet Dhillon, President Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, has made clear she intends to go after race-based minority districts in blue states in what can only be called a judicial whitewash.
But we shouldn’t just worry about congressional districts and control of the House of Representatives. We may soon have to defend the hard-won gains for minority representation in L.A. County government.
For me, the whole sad reapportionment saga triggered flashbacks of happier days in 1990, a year after I joined the staff of Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman. At that time, the Reagan Justice Department, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund had jointly sued the county for diluting Latino voter strength in the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys by splitting their growing communities among three supervisorial districts, thus preventing the election of a Latino supervisor.
Mariel Garza
While county, city and other local government offices in California are officially nonpartisan, it was no secret then that Republicans dominated the board. A GOP troika led by First District Supervisor Pete Schabarum hoped to settle the lawsuit by redrawing Edelman’s Democratic district as a new Latino seat, thus placating the Latino community without sacrificing Republican control.
Instead, U.S. District Judge David Kenyon ruled for the plaintiffs and ordered the county to adopt the new lines they had proposed — which sensibly made Schabarum’s district, centered on the eastern part of the county, predominantly Latino.
And so it happened in 1991 that Gloria Molina was elected L.A. County’s first Latina Supervisor, a triumph for racial justice that saw her join a new liberal Democratic majority. Her swearing-in at the Board’s packed hearing room was a joyful celebration of optimism and ethnic pride.
The following year, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke became the first Black woman elected to the Board, succeeding the retiring white incumbent, Kenneth Hahn.
Jim Newton
That was then, and now I wonder: Would Molina’s election have happened under the Callais decision?
To better understand our situation, I reached out to J. Morgan Kousser, a historian and voting rights expert based at Caltech who testified as an expert witness in the L.A. County case. Is it possible, I asked, that somebody could now challenge, based on Callais, the county lines drawn to create a Latino First District?
“I think it’s quite possible,” Kousser told me. “We know that we’re going to see it.”
He noted that while Dhillon has said the Department of Justice will target congressional seats, other local districts could also be vulnerable. But when voters approved a measure to expand the Board of Supervisors from five to nine members over the next few election cycles, I don’t think they intended to create all-white districts.
When I suggested to Kousser that Callais might be our era’s Dred Scott or Plessy decision — those infamous and discredited 19th-century Supreme Court cases upholding slavery and racial discrimination — he quickly corrected me. Dred Scott was wiped out after eight years with the end of the Civil War in 1865 and adoption of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery and the 14th establishing birthright citizenship. Plessy established the “separate but equal” doctrine but didn’t bar states from enacting their own civil rights protections, as many did.
Mariel Garza
Callais, however, is swiftly going national. Lawmakers in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee are reconvening to redraw their lines and whiten congressional districts. More states could follow.
As Kousser told me, “They want to get rid of every Black or Latino Democratic official in the country, as a whole. They want to do it. As quickly as possible.”
That should be a warning to Los Angeles County and every other place where minority voters gained representation using the very laws now under attack by the Supreme Court.
