The Supreme Court Just Greenlighted Racial Gerrymandering. It Didn’t Go Far Enough for Clarence Thomas.

is a devastating blow to the fight against racial gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the conservative supermajority guts a series of precedents that guarded against racist redistricting, granting state legislatures sweeping new authority to sort their residents between districts on the basis of skin color.

And yet, as bad as Alito’s opinion was, it didn’t go far enough for Justice Clarence Thomas, who penned a solo concurrence demanding a radical move: The Supreme Court, he argued, should overrule every precedent that limits gerrymandering—including the landmark cases establishing “one person, one vote”—because it has no constitutional power to redraw maps in the first place.

Thomas wrote that SCOTUS can fix its mistake by returning “political districting to the political branches, where it belongs.” But how can victims of racist redistricting prevail in the political branches when those very branches have permanently locked them out of power by making their votes count for nothing? They can’t, which is why the Supreme Court stepped in.

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