SATURDAY: AG Holder's redistricting dream!

SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2026

A very murky topic: On this campus, we have high regard for former attorney general Eric Holder. 

If we told you what we admire most about Holder, it might make you mad. That said, he was interviewed by Lawrence O'Donnell on Wednesday's edition of The Last Word—interviewed about that day's Supreme Court decision concerning the Voting Rights Act.

(Interesting factoid: It's routinely referred to as "The Voting Rights Act of 1965." In fact, the language at issue in Section 2 of the VRA—the part of Section 2 which was directly at issue this week—wasn't added to the Act until 1982!)

Back to Holder's session with O'Donnell:

It was a fairly brisk, four-question exchange; you can watch the whole thing simply by clicking here. The interview ended with Holder's answer to a somewhat vague but basically reasonable question. 

Throughout the session, O'Donnell tended to conflate the challenge of this year's pre-existing redistricting war with the longer-term challenges created by the Supreme Court's new decision. That said, this was the start, and this was the heart, of what Holder said at the end of this interview about where we should go from here:

O'DONNELL (4/29/26): Is a kind of counter-offensive of redistricting the only option here for Democrats to consider?

HOLDER: Well, I think that's what we have to consider in the short term, so we can save our democracy and then ultimately heal it. 

And I think the way we ultimately heal it is for Democrats to take control of Congress, to have a Democratic president, and then to pass federal legislation that bans partisan gerrymandering, that bans racial gerrymandering, that requires that redistricting be done in a fair way that advances fair electoral processes.  

As the former AG continued, he cited the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was passed by the House in 2021 but was defeated by a filibuster in the Senate. But this was Holder's explicit description of the change he'd like to see:   

Democrats should "pass federal legislation that bans partisan gerrymandering, that bans racial gerrymandering, that requires that redistricting be done in a fair way that advances fair electoral processes."

In general, we agree! We ourselves would love to see federal legislation which creates sensible, uniform redistricting standards which every state would follow.  

Almost surely, it would be hard to get our two warring parties to agree on what a set of "fair" standards might be. But we wholly agree with Holder's general principle.   

Having said that, there came the confusion again! Our current confusion is this:

Holder said he wanted to see Democrats find a way to ban "racial gerrymandering." But isn't that pretty much what the Supreme Court just did, in a ruling the former AG savaged at the start of his session with O'Donnell?  

Isn't that what the Court just did? People, listen up: 

At the start of this legal fandango, Louisiana had created a map which included one district, out of six, which was majority black.  

In response to a lawsuit, the state had been ordered to create a second such district, and the state proceeded to do so. Specifically, the state proceeded to create a plainly "gerrymandered" district which was, in fact, majority black. 

It was that very district which the Supreme Court has now ruled to be constitutionally impermissible.  But if we're all still speaking English here, hadn't that very district been created, for better or worse, by a racial gerrymander?

Will the Court's ruling allow southern states to eliminate majority black districts, thereby reducing the number of black members of Congress? 

Presumably, yes! Indeed, Republican governors of some southern states are scrambling to do that right now!

But there was Holder, explicitly saying that he wants to pass a federal law which would ban "racial gerrymandering." Isn't that the very process which has often been used, in recent decades, to create the majority black districts which sent an increased number of black reps to the House?   

We admire Holder at this site. Also, though, we have no idea what he meant in that final prescription to O'Donnell. 

This is an extremely murky, highly complexified topic. Back in 1982, jumbled language was introduced into Section 2 of the Act, approved by huge margins in both the House and the Senate. From that day to this, journalistic, political and legal language about this topic has been extremely hard to parse.

We humans aren't always especially good with our words! That said, what would Holder like to see in the federal legislation he envisions?  Does he want to see compact, contiguous districts formed without regard to race? 

Some districts formed that way would be majority black. But in contrast to current procedures, wouldn't that tend to reduce the number of black members in the House? Is that the solution he actually envisions? 

Inquiring minds want to know. (O'Donnell should have asked!)