Louisiana has given a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court what it wants–argumentation to cancel one of the greatest con jobs in legal history.

Today, the state turned in its brief in Louisiana v. Callais as requested by the Court. Heard last spring, the Court took the unusual step of delaying any decision on the case that invalidated the state’s congressional map. It held off until Oct. 15, when it will address whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act conflicts with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The state had complained there was conflict. It claimed it had to follow the Allen v. Milligan precedent, which said states had to follow jurisprudence from Thornburg v. Gingles on down, which fleshed out Section 2. That line of cases created the assumption that if a minority group in a jurisdiction met certain criteria (the “Gingles Preconditions”), then intent no longer mattered. Any reapportionment plan was deemed discriminatory unless the number of majority-minority districts roughly matched the group’s share of the population. This was true regardless of whether the plan respected traditional principles of reapportionment such as contiguity, compactness, or keeping communities of interest together. The result: “vote dilution” was presumed by definition, justifying race as the preferred criterion in drawing a map.

But in that Allen decision, Assoc. Justice Brett Kavanaugh sowed the seeds for a reevaluation of that base assumption. He wrote that the Court should someday ask whether this assumption was timebound, though the question wasn’t in Allen. That was the question the Court posed instead of making a ruling, and Louisiana answered using ammunition unavailable at the time of that case.

Three weeks after Allen in 2023, the Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that negated almost all uses of race in admissions and addressed the same 14^th Amendment. The Court accepted the argument that conditions had changed. Minorities could no longer be given automatic preference based on past discrimination unless intentional discrimination was shown. Louisiana now applies the same reasoning to the idea that vote dilution always equals racial discrimination.

In doing so, the state exposed the increasing chicanery of those who defend the old assumption. Proponents now use bizarre claims, such as racism existing because a sheriff’s office is on the same floor as a registrar’s office. Some even argue that the absence of evidence proves discrimination–it is simply hidden too well.

Understand the intellectually-porous assumption here. As overt racism began to subside by the 1980s in measurements of people’s attitudes and in their actions, academia came up with a new redefinition to make the claim race prejudice lives on: “symbolic racism,” or the idea that opposition to policies designed to give preferential treatment to minorities, or even to race-neutral policies whose beneficiaries were disproportionately minorities, itself was a hidden form of racism. The idea evolved into wokeism where someone is considered a racist for merely supporting the idea that government and societal institutions are not irredeemably racist, making one a racist, for example, if believing meritocracy should determine employment or admissions decisions because the idea of merit itself is racist as the forces determining what is that are rigged against minorities.

This ethos drives the proportionality argument in reapportionment (despite the fact that the VRA explicitly disavows its use). In essence, it argues that there is no conflict between the amendment and statute because “the only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” but which must assume that present discrimination institutionally and can do so only with tortuous, nonsensical arguments that attempt to redefine what genuine prejudicial discrimination is.

The dirty secret is obvious. The true goal is political power. Proponents invent “present discrimination” as a given behind any arrangement that does not give preferential treatment by race in favor of the minority, because they know in mapping a maximization of M/M districts, it bolsters the power of the political left because almost all black political elites–who would win in these districts–are leftists who wave the bloody shirt decrying constantly alleged racism as a major reason to elect them.

By contrast, the Louisiana argument invites consideration that a reluctance to maximize the number of M/M districts isn’t to discriminate against blacks but, as one potential motivation, to minimize the number of districts controlled by leftists who happen to be a minority. This resulting understanding that causation differs from association explains why very likely not only will the Court end up upholding that the state’s proportional system is unconstitutional because it’s a racial gerrymander, but that it also will rule the guidelines it put down in Gingles have outlived their usefulness and conditions have changed to the point that the conflict with the Equal Protection Clause no longer can be ignored.