Right now, as we are about six months away from the midterms, the U.S. Supreme Court just made

a monumental ruling, which truly has the potential to be one of, if not the deciding factor,

of who winds up controlling the House moving forward. The ruling is monumental because it

basically struck down an interpretation of the

Voting Rights Act, which has, for about six or seven decades now, forced southern states to

draw up congressional maps in a way that maximizes the black vote. If you look at a map,

congressional districts in these states, they've been drawn in some of the strangest

of ways because they've been forced by the courts to basically connect disparate pockets of

black neighborhoods together. However, this state of affairs, it has just been ruled to be

unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. And the southern states in question, many of whom

actually have

GOP-led state legislatures, they are now free for the first time in decades to redraw their

congressional maps without the concern for the racial makeup of the people living there. And the

reason this truly does matter is because the black vote is overwhelmingly Democrat

leaning, meaning the districts in question, the ones that are likely about to get redrawn,

probably many of which before the midterm elections, will be flipped from blue-leaning

to red-leaning.

Let's unpack this story together in three steps, starting with the legal framework that was in place for the past several decades, the Supreme Court's new ruling, and then also what this means moving forward, including which specific districts are likely to get seriously amended.

And of course, if you appreciate content like this, please do take a quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this video can be picked up by the YouTube algorithm and shared out to ever more people. Thank you so much for that. Now to start with, let's go through the legal backdrop of this particular case. For decades now, one of the surprising aspects of the American electoral system is that racial gerrymandering has been required by law. Meaning, under certain

circumstances, if a state legislature redrew a state's congressional district and they did not go

out of their way to give more weight to minorities, specifically to African Americans, then that was

actually illegal. Basically, states had to consider race when apportioning their congressional districts.

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