JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – New sessions are scheduled to begin this week in two Republican-controlled states after the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
The Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais weakened a requirement that states draw congressional districts in a way that gives minorities an opportunity to control their own fate.
The requirement in the Voting Rights Act was that in areas where white people and outnumbered racial minorities vote differently, districts be drawn to give those minorities a chance to elect representatives they prefer.
The Supreme Court’s ruling weakening that provision when it comes to Congressional districts opened a new set of political floodgates.
And City Council member Rory Diamond, a Republican, is eager to see Jacksonville wade into those redistricting waters.
In a social media post, Diamond argued that in light of the Supreme Court’s decision, “the Jax City Council map must be redrawn.”
With the recent Supreme Court decision Louisiana v. Callais, the Jax City Council map must be redrawn.
— Rory Diamond (@RoryDiamond) May 2, 2026
Judge Howard relied heavily on race in drawing the map, and it is therefore unconstitutional.
We have a duty to draft a race-neutral map.
There is more than enough time.
Diamond, who is term-limited out this year, argued that the judge who redrew the district map “relied heavily on race” and the map is “therefore unconstitutional.”
“We don’t have a map that’s constitutional today,” Diamond said in an interview with News4JAX. “I absolutely expect pushback. People are going to… the race hustlers are pushing back already. But a fair map is what people of Jacksonville deserve."
In an interview with News4JAX, however, Duval County Supervisor of Elections Jerry Holland, also a Republican, pointed out that Jacksonville’s current maps don’t take race into account.
In fact, he said, the federal judge who oversaw Jacksonville’s last process after the 2020 census threw out a race-based map.
“In the last redistricting, the court ruled that the council’s map was based on race and threw that map out and required them to come back and look at that and come back with a map that wasn’t based on race,” Holland said. “Based on the judge’s acceptance of the map that was accepted and approved, I would say they did not make their lines based on race.”
Holland points out that there have been attempts to split sections of town like Arlington at one point, but Arlington remained a single district.
Diamond said he might introduce legislation to redraw the districts ahead of the next city election, and it’s possible lawsuits could be filed over the current map. He suspects lawsuits are a distinct possibility and are possibly being drawn up now.
“It’s a lot of work, and you have to do stuff that’s hard and controversial, but going to a race-neutral map is what the Constitution requires,” Diamond said. “It’s going to be a huge mess. But doing the right thing isn’t always easy.”
Nationwide redistricting war
President Donald Trump ignited the conflict over redistricting last year by urging Republicans to redraw congressional maps to reduce the likelihood that his party loses the U.S. House in the November midterm elections.
It was an unusual step, since redistricting normally only takes place after the once-a-decade census to accommodate population shifts. But in 2019 the Supreme Court ruled federal courts cannot prevent partisan gerrymandering, and Trump saw a chance to push the limits.
Once Republican-led states like Texas started shifting district lines, Democratic-led states like California countered. The fight was heading for a draw until the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued its long-awaited decision in Louisiana v. Callais.
Republicans in Tennessee plan to erase the only Democratic congressional district, which is majority Black and centered in Memphis, by splitting it up among more conservative suburban and rural white communities. More than a dozen other majority-minority districts, mainly in the South, could face the same fate.
Louisiana moved to postpone its congressional primaries, set for May 16, to have a chance to redraw two majority-Black Democratic seats it was required to maintain before the recent ruling. Alabama is trying to get the Supreme Court to let it redraw its two majority-Black seats.
“We should demand that State Legislatures do what the Supreme Court says must be done,” Trump wrote on social media on Sunday. “That is more important than administrative convenience.”
He said Republicans could gain 20 seats through redistricting.
Democrats have threatened to retaliate by splitting up conservative bastions in states like New York and Illinois, which would reallocate Republican voters to more liberal, urban districts.
With fewer limits — either legal or self-imposed — people expect the issue to become a perpetual race to squeeze every possible advantage out of legislative maps.
“It’s hard to know where it ends,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA.