Welcome back, Deadline: Legal newsletter readers. When the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais in April, Justice Elena Kagan said in dissent that the case marked the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” The ruling bolstered Republican efforts to reshape electoral maps in their quest to further cement political power.
Yet it also helped to galvanize Democrats in the midterm elections. It certainly motivated one of the most notable Democrats riding the “blue tsunami” to Washington: Mississippi’s Scott Colom. He cited Callais in an interview with MS NOW’s Symone Sanders Townsend after he defeated GOP incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith for a Senate seat.
To understand the significance of Colom’s victory, consider my colleague Jarvis DeBerry’s observation that it was historic partly because “every Democrat the state previously sent to the Senate was some combination of slave owner, Confederate soldier or segregationist,” but even more so because Colom “is Black, and for the first time, voters in the Blackest state in the country have elected a Black person to a statewide office.”
In his interview with Sanders Townsend, Colom said that when Callais came out and Republicans started gerrymandering in Tennessee and threatening to do so in his state, he “knew that that was a threat to go backwards in a way that’s going to hurt a state like Mississippi.” Colom said that the threat prompted him to “start focusing and giving everything I got, being as creative as I could be, listening to the right people, staying in prayer, and just working hard.”
Read the rest of my roundup here.
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