The Journal’s Jason L. O’Riley discusses the “fainting spells” happening on the left over last week’s Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. Likely to be expected,” writes M. O’Riley.

Democrats these days reject colorblind public policies that they championed in a previous era and scoff at clear evidence of America’s racial progress.

Democratic elites from Barack Obama on down are outraged. Obama wrote in response to the decision:

“Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities. And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.”

Mr. Riley calls Obama’s response “nonsense.” The case before the court concerned Louisiana’s 2024 decision, under pressure from the courts, to draw a congressional map that included a second majority-black district.

• Supporters said the racial gerrymander was necessary to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bars the use of qualifications, standards or procedures that make it harder for minorities to cast a ballot.

• Opponents maintained that the map violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause by sorting voters based on race.

The Justices, in a 6-3 ruling, sided with the challengers and said Louisiana unlawfully discriminated by race when it created a second majority-black district.

Mr. Obama, argues Mr. O’Riley, is pretending that the decision somehow threatens the black franchise, but it didn’t touch Section 2 protections against efforts to restrict black voting.

All the court did was scale back a judicially created doctrine based on the assumption that most white voters would never support black candidates. The former president, of all people, should appreciate that this is no longer the case.

Mr. Obama won the presidency in 2008, where he secured a larger share of the white vote than the two previous nominees of his party, John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. Obama also carried a majority of the white vote in nearly a third of the states. Obama was re-elected in 2012, where the black voter turnout rate exceeded the white turnout.

Today, black voter registration in the South, where black voter suppression was most pronounced in the Jim Crow era, is higher than in other regions of the U.S.

It could be argued that Mr. Obama’s race was more a political advantage than a barrier to success, offers O’Riley.

Long before his arrival on the political scene, majority-white electorates demonstrated a willingness to vote for black candidates.

• When Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of Cleveland in 1968, most residents were white.

• This was also true when Tom Bradley became the first black mayor of Los Angeles in 1973 and when David Dinkins won New York’s mayoral election in 1989.

• The political website FiveThirtyEight reported in 2023 that most black members of Congress no longer hail from majority-black districts, “which indicates that Black representatives are winning more on multiracial or majority-white turf.”

Last week’s ruling has nothing to do with voting rights and everything to do with the ability of Democrats to use the 1965 act to gain a partisan advantage in drawing political maps.
The Voting Rights Act was intended to ensure ballot access, not to ensure the election of black Democrats. Republicans and Democrats alike jockey to draw maps that give them an edge on Election Day, continues Mr. O’Riley.

It’s unseemly because it amounts to lawmakers choosing voters instead of the other way around, but it’s legal. What’s illegal, the court ruled, is throwing race into the map-drawing mix absent specific evidence of discrimination, as Democrats have been doing for decades in the name of protecting the black vote.

The heavy irony here is that racial gerrymandering has probably done more to throttle black ambition and to deepen our country’s political division.

Political scientist Abigail Thernstrom wrote in her 2009 history of the act, “Voting Rights—and Wrongs:”

“While the country has moved steadily, if unevenly, toward racial integration, the law has created a black political class too isolated from mainstream political discourse… Race-based districts have kept “black legislators clustered together on the sidelines of American political life—precisely the opposite of what the statute intended.”

Segregation allowed black Americans generally to share a common experience of being second-class citizens, writes Mr. O’Riley.

No longer the case, “but the supporters of segregated voting districts and racial preferences in hiring and college admissions would have us believe that nothing has really changed. Racial-gerrymandering advocates today assume that black voters are essentially fungible and share identical political preferences. That’s not only false but insulting, and this Supreme Court corrective couldn’t come soon enough.”