President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Texas Republicans have reignited the gerrymandering wars. The brazen power grab in Texas pushed Democrats to start their own efforts to unravel independent commissions established by voters, and now it’s threatening to tilt the whole country into chaos.
Mr. Trump and his G.O.P. allies are surely the instigators, but the true architect of this mess, the person who bears as much or more responsibility for it, is Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative Supreme Court. Over several years of rulings, this court has effectively rolled back laws that had for generations protected the right to vote.
The current frenzy is just the latest example of the most antidemocratic feature of American politics in 2025. It’s the toxic combination of the conservative Supreme Court majority and a political party that believes longstanding norms are for suckers and that lacks any commitment to fair play and majority rule.
Since he joined Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department in 1981 as a young foot soldier in the nascent conservative legal movement, Chief Justice Roberts has pursued the patient, steady bleeding of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, he wrote the 5-to-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that effectively ended preclearance, the Voting Rights Act’s most effective enforcement mechanism, and liberated states, many clustered in the South, from federal oversight of legislative maps.
But the case that did the most to bring us to our current impasse came six years later, Rucho v. Common Cause. The gerrymander mayhem was created by the Rucho case. In that decision — also 5 to 4 and written by the chief justice — the court ruled that partisan gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable political question and shuttered the federal courts to future claims. The decision incentivized extreme gerrymanders nationwide and left voters all but powerless to challenge them.
The chaos we face today could have been prevented. Instead, the court enabled it. At a time when Americans might look to federal courts as honest brokers, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority kicked away the best, even last, chance at enforcing a national solution to a national problem.
The Rucho decision arrived after federal judges nationwide, appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents, had examined maps drawn by both parties during the 2011 cycles. Many of those judges recognized that modern gerrymanders, devised on sophisticated software with the help of voluminous voter data, were a serious threat to fair elections, and that the federal courts had a unique responsibility to protect voters. Judges tossed plans drawn by Democrats in Maryland and Republicans in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina.
The lower-court rulings made clear that the same technology that allowed politicians to warp maps also provided all the tools judges needed to knock them down.
But Chief Justice Roberts insisted there was no clear, politically neutral standard. “Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties,” he wrote, “with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”
His decision feigned ignorance of the difference between a gerrymander drawn in 1981 and one sketched out on sophisticated supercomputers four decades later. He pretended that voters can fix gerrymandering by tossing rascals out of office, a remedy that doesn’t take into account how gerrymandering works.
The chief justice, borrowing his move from the Shelby decision, even disingenuously suggested that Congress could solve the problem if Americans wanted it fixed. This allowed him to erase his own fingerprints and push a problem he did not want solved toward a branch he knew would not solve it.
And while he praised nonpartisan movements that prevailed in shaping nonpartisan redistricting processes in Michigan, Colorado and elsewhere, he actually signed their death warrant. Once the court took a national standard off the table, reformers operating in good faith would be leading their state toward unilateral disarmament during a blood feud with those using legal means but acting in bad faith.
Not surprisingly, egregious gerrymanders poured out. The 2021-22 redistricting cycle proved to be a bipartisan gerrymandering orgy. The worst offenders from the decade before managed to go further still. More insidiously, Republican lawmakers looked to get away with illegal racial gerrymanders by claiming they were allowable partisan gerrymanders. The combination of Shelby County and Rucho enabled this regressive strategy.
Ever more partisan state courts have provided little help. Ohio lawmakers felt confident that they could stiff-arm the state Supreme Court when it tried to strike down partisan gerrymandered maps. North Carolina voters actually turned to their state court, and they won a fair and balanced map. But then the partisan balance on that court changed hands, and the court reversed itself, citing Chief Justice Roberts’s ruling. By 2024, the G.O.P.-led legislature had imposed a map with 10 safe Republican seats, three safe Democratic seats and one swing district, netting the party three more seats — enough to give it its current majority in the House. In theory, state courts offer a place to bring complaints, but realistically, especially in red states, they have offered very little recourse.
Now Texas looks to push gerrymandering to further antidemocratic heights. Its audacious mid-decade power play has fueled gerrymandering wars that may grow beyond containment. Democrats in California and New York might end or suspend the citizen-won commissions that Chief Justice Roberts suggested had solved the redistricting problem. The gerrymander fever may soon spread to Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois and perhaps Maryland, Georgia, Kentucky and New Hampshire.
The Supreme Court could have controlled this. This is, after all, a court that usually has no qualms about developing its own standards. Instead, on gerrymandering, it provided gasoline for more gerrymandering conflagrations, and failed the nation.
The outlook is bleak for national consensus, since Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a destructive struggle for partisan advantage. Republicans have gone for broke.
Democrats, too, have now cast aside a decade of anti-gerrymandering messaging. In 2021, all 50 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus supported the For the People Act, which contained strong, anti-gerrymandering provisions. The filibuster prevented it from moving forward. Since polls show voters across party lines hate gerrymandering, Democrats should have brought the legislation forward as a stand-alone bill when they had trifecta power. They did not — but perhaps sometime in the future, they can again.
Of course, there is no guarantee it would pass constitutional muster with the Roberts court.
The serial gutting of the Voting Rights Act (which will most likely see its final act in the 2025-26 term) shows that the Roberts court’s devotion to democratic politics is selective. The last time elected officials weighed in on the law, to reauthorize it, was 2006. In the House, the vote was 390 to 33. In the Senate, not a single senator — not one, from any state — voted against it. The vote was 98 to 0.
Yet for a law with overwhelming bipartisan democratic support, the Roberts court has shown that justices do have the tools to act — to overturn the overwhelming judgment of elected officials.
The combination that has defined the unsettling politics of America in 2025 — a Supreme Court unabashed about dismantling what was settled law on a range of issues, such as abortion, independent agencies and the like, and an administration eager to push the boundaries of executive power — has, in the gerrymandering chaos, struck again.
Realistically, voters have nowhere to turn. John Roberts abandoned them long ago. The predictable destruction we are sure to face belongs to him.
David Daley’s books include “Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy” and “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count.”
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