Category: News

Options After Callais

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

What are the options for dealing with Callais’ decimation of Sec. 2 of the Voting Rights Act and Rucho’s determination that partisan redistricting claims are not justiciable in the federal courts?

Callais is already leading to the destruction of Black-majority congressional districts and to the destruction of any hope for a multi-racial democracy, especially in the South. Rucho has led to a battle to the bottom, in which state legislatures have begun redistricting congressional districts to the benefit of the majority party in those states’ legislatures.

There are three principal responses: federal anti-gerrymandering legislation, state anti-legislation, and proportional representation.

Federal Anti-Gerrymandering Legislation

Congress has the power, pursuant to Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, to enact laws governing the time, place, and manner of elections for Members of the House of Representatives. Democrats have repeatedly introduced bills in Congress that would prohibit states from engaging in partisan gerrymandering or redistricting and from redistricting congressional districts in mid-decade. The current bills are S. 2885 and H.R. 5449.

Those bills would prohibit any state from using “a redistricting plan to conduct an election that, when considered on a statewide basis, has been drawn with the intent or has the effect of materially favoring or disfavoring any political party.” They would establish criteria for deciding whether a districting plan was adopted for partisan reasons, would establish a private right of action with three-judge panels and a right to appeal to the D.C. Circuit, and would require each state to establish independent, non- partisan redistricting commissions.

The House passed, in 2022, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which contained prohibitions against partisan congressional redistricting. But the bill died in the Senate because of a Republican filibuster.

Right now, the bills prohibiting partisan redistricting would meet a similar fate, and would be vetoed by Pres. Trump if the Senate amended the filibuster rules to let them pass. Republicans now believe that partisan redistricting is in their partisan best interests.

It is possible that Democrats in states with legislatures controlled by their party will be able to create enough new Democratic congressional seats to cancel out the new Republican congressional seats created by Republican state legislators. Only if the two parties realize that they are evenly disadvantaged by partisan redistricting will congressional Republicans probably agree to sponsor these bills.

State Anti-Gerrymandering Legislation

A number of states require redistricting to be done by independent commissions, provided that partisan redistricting claims are justiciable in those states’ courts, or otherwise prohibit or limit partisan redistricting. Florida, for example, has state constitutional provisions prohibiting maps “drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.”

Those provisions did not stop Florida Gov. DeSantis and the Republican- controlled state legislature from adopting new maps that, if adopted, would net 4 new seats for Republicans. A circuit court judge, on May 26, 2026, refused to issue a preliminary injunction because he concluded there was “insufficient evidence of impermissible intent.” That judge would have accepted the legislature’s denial that Donald Duck is a duck.

Proportional Representation

Another approach would be to abandon gerrymandering altogether, by providing for proportional representation on a state-wide basis. For example, assume that a state has 10 congressional districts and that Party A won 60% of the congressional vote state-wide, while Party B won 40% of the vote. In a proportional system, six of the state’s districts would be represented by politicians affiliated with Party A, and 40% by representatives from Party B.

In that system, the districts with the highest votes for Party A would have representatives from that party. That would eliminate the worst inequities of partisan gerrymandering. People would no longer see their votes wasted because of the drawing of district boundaries. That would incentivize each political party and each party’s voters to vote, regardless of the way the boundaries are drawn.

However, there is a real possibility that a proportional-representation scheme in a state with a large number of congressional districts, such as California or Texas, could be won by minor parties, which could further fracture the political system. Overall, however, this kind of scheme would reduce extreme partisanship and eliminate the current race to the bottom of racial gerrymandering.

Written By Barry Roseman, SU4W Board Member

The Fifteenth Amendment and Callais

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

I wrote an article in the May issue of the Stand Up For Workers newsletter about the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. I only briefly mentioned the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution in that piece.

The Callais majority decision effectively determined that Sec. 2 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, while claiming that it was merely “updat[ing]” the framework for determining whether Sec. 2 has been violated. That was a cynical exercise of the conservative majority’s power. The majority opinion would have been more intellectually honest if it had said what it was doing. The claim that it was just updating the Sec. 2 framework fooled no one.

Sec. 2 was enacted pursuant to both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits the states from “deny[ing] or abridg[ing]” the “right of citizens of the United States to vote” because of their “race.” In fact, the Fifteenth Amendment is the only provision in the Constitution that expressly prohibits racial discrimination.

Southern states diluted Black citizens’ votes by gerrymandering congressional districts as early as the 1870s. The Supreme Court in 1980 rejected a claim of racial dilution pursuant to Sec. 2 because the plaintiffs had not proven that the dilution scheme was done for a racial reason. Congress rejected that interpretation of Sec. 2.

In its 1982 amendments to the VRA, it expressly supported racial-dilution claims and provided that it is not necessary to prove discriminatory intent to prevail on such claims. Congress had the power to adopt the amended Sec. 2 pursuant to the Fifteenth Amendment, which grants Congress the “power to enforce this [amendment] by appropriate legislation.” The Supreme Court, in 1966, decided that “Congress may use any rational means to effectuate the constitutional prohibition of racial discrimination in voting.” The Callais majority concluded that that Fifteenth Amendment power is limited to efforts to end intentional racial discrimination in voting. The majority reasoned that redistricting for partisan reasons does not violate Sec. 2. But voting by Black voters in the South is highly partisan now, as it was in the 1870s and 1880s. Partisan redistricting is racial redistricting, especially in the South, where almost all Black individuals and relatively few white people vote for Democrats. Congress amended Sec. 2 because Southern state legislatures solemnly stated that they had no racial animus is drawing district lines.

That is nonsense. Of course they did, since they knew the penalties of being honest about their intent.

State legislatures are populated and advised by lawyers. State legislators are acutely aware of the importance of legislative district boundaries. They know where the district boundaries are located and know that Black voters in the South overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

The drawing of district boundaries is an intentional act. Sec. 2 was amended because evidence of racial results is evidence of racial intent. It is not necessary to find direct evidence of racial intent, since that intent is inferred from legislatures’ intentional decisions to create districts that result in racial discrimination.

Callais is written from the perspective of the white majority legal and political system in this country. Black citizens in the South – with the apparent exception of Justice Thomas – understand that racial discrimination is alive and well in their state legislatures. The Voting Rights Act was adopted to end that discrimination. As a result of Callais, that discrimination is alive and well.

It is ironic that as this country celebrates the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the aftermath of the peculiar institution of slavery continues to rear its ugly head in the heart of this democracy. The Callais decision will destroy Black representation in most of the South, until and unless it is overturned or until Congress abolishes partisan gerrymandering or requires proportional representation for congressional districts.

*******

On June 2, 2026, by a vote of 6-3, a majority of the Supreme Court granted a motion for stay in Allen v. Milligan, after a three-judge panel in the Southern District of Alabama concluded that the Alabama state legislature had intentionally discriminated on the basis of race in creating a legislative map that included only one Black-majority congressional district.

The Supreme Court decided in the same case in 2023 that Alabama’s congressional map unlawfully discriminated on the basis of race against Black residents of that state. The district court then held an 11-day trial in which 51 witnesses testified and almost 800 exhibits were exhibited into evidence. The district court concluded that the legislature acted with a discriminatory purpose and not for partisan reasons. The Supreme Court ignored that clear evidentiary record in allowing Alabama to hold an election with only one Black-majority district this year.

Written by Barry Roseman, SU4W Board Member

Response to Louisiana v. Callais Decision

Posted on by Stand Up for Workers Action

The conservative majority of the Supreme Court just completed a project by Chief Justice Roberts, waged for more than four decades, to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, seriously harming representative democracy in this country.

First, a brief history lesson.

From 1619 to 1865, most African Americans in the U.S. were enslaved, with “no rights which the white man was bound to accept,” as stated in Dred Scott v. Sandford. After the end of the Civil War and the adoption of the 15th Amendment, Black individuals in the South were given and then deprived of voting rights. For nearly 90 years, African Americans were prevented from voting and subjected to Jim Crow laws in the former Confederate States. That ended, formally, in 1965, with the Voting Rights Act. But, John Roberts began working to eliminate the VRA’s protections as a young lawyer in 1982. He completed those efforts with his decision on April 29, 2026 in Louisiana v. Callais.

The VRA has two enforcement provisions in Sections 2 and 5. The pre-clearance language in Sec. 5 required legislatures in certain states, principally in the South, to clear any changes to voting procedures in advance with the U.S. Department of Justice. The Supreme Court decided in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 that those pre-clearance provisions were no longer needed because “things had changed dramatically” since 1965 and “Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem [racial discrimination in voting] speaks to current conditions.”

It is true that the former restrictions against Black voters, such as poll taxes, had disappeared in those years, but racial discrimination in voting persisted. Those states, predictably, immediately began enacting voting restrictions against African American voters. Section 2 still offered the possibility of attacking legislative redistricting that adversely affected Black voters. For decades, Southern legislators have “packed” Black citizens into a few districts and “cracked” other African American voters into white majority districts. Roberts hollowed out Section 2, which was used in those voting dilution cases, in Callais.

The heart of the majority opinion in that decision is a new requirement for challenges to a redistricting scheme. The plaintiffs now need to show the new district lines are not done for partisan purposes. Since the vast majority of Black voters in the South are Democrats, districting to support the Republican party is therefore also done for racial reasons. Partisan redistricting is racial districting in the South.

The Louisiana secretary of state declared an “emergency” after Callais was handed down. The clear purpose of that declaration, declared three days before primary voting in that state was scheduled to begin, is to redistrict either or both of the congressional districts now represented by Black individuals in Louisiana. Up to twelve Black- represented districts now are in peril of racial dilution. In 2019, the Supreme Court decided, in Rucho v. Common Cause, that claims of partisan gerrymandering cannot be brought in federal court despite the fact that partisan gerrymandering is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from taking an action based on the viewpoint of a speaker, especially when the speech is political and when the action harms the speaker. A person cannot be deprived of a business license because of that person’s speech, but that same person can be deprived of the right to have effective representation because of speech and association with others. The Supreme Court decided in Rucho not that such partisan gerrymandering was legal, but rather that it would not do anything about it. Callais will result in racial gerrymandering that will deprive Black voters in the South of representation by legislators who support their interests. Rucho deprives all voters of the right to be represented by people who support their interests.

The branch of the federal government that is not selected by the voters, populated by judges with life terms, has decided to destroy representative democracy in this country. It is thwarting the will of Congress. It is deciding these cases based on a fictional view of reality. It is exaggerating the partisan divide in the states by incentivizing Democratic legislators to redistrict to favor Democrats and Republican legislators to favor Republicans.

The conservative justices on the Supreme Court are now politicians in black robes. That could destroy the Court, or representative democracy, and maybe both. If the voters do not elect a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate in 2026, and if that majority does not effectively address this issue, Black legislators and representative democracy will be in mortal danger.

Help us move the needle forward in getting democracy back into Congress during the midterm elections with by making a donation of any amount to the Stand Up For Workers PAC.

Written By Barry Roseman, SU4W Board Member

National Employment Lawyers Association Applauds The Equal Remedies Act Of 2024

Posted on by su4waction

As it appears on NELA’s website.

The act would eliminate statutory damage caps and enhance protections for workers in discrimination cases

For Immediate Release
Contact: Andrea Hansen
509.306.1867
[email protected]

Stand Up For Workers Equal Remedies Act 2024

Concord, Calif. – May 8, 2024 – Today, in a significant milestone for workers’ rights, Representatives Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), Bobby Scott (D-VA), and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced the Equal Remedies Act of 2024. The proposed legislation calls for the elimination of statutory damage caps for employment discrimination in civil rights cases, and would modernize the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) to allow those who experience age discrimination to pursue compensatory and punitive damages.

The National Employment Lawyers Association (NELA) applauds Representatives Bonamici and Scott and Senator Markey on this important piece of legislation and strongly supports the bill to ensure workers have meaningful access to justice when they experience illegal treatment in the workplace.

“Discrimination persists in the workplace for a lot of reasons, but these arbitrary caps that take away the jury’s role in deciding how employers who violate the law are held accountable are a significant factor,” said Linda Correia, immediate past president of NELA’s board of directors. “I have represented many workers who have been harmed by these caps and am grateful for Sen. Markey’s leadership, as well as that of Reps. Bonamici and Scott, on this bill to correct this injustice.”

Under current law, even when workers win, they lose. Workers who win employment discrimination cases cannot receive a jury’s full award for the harm they suffer because of an outdated and unfair provision found in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 that subjects workers to these arbitrary limits. Juries will often award plaintiffs damages well above the statutory caps for victims of discrimination, but a judge then must reduce that award, in many cases by more than 90%.

The limits depend on the number of employees within a workplace, but are often out of scale with the operations of the business itself; for example, damages awards in cases involving employers with more than 500 employees are generally capped at $300,000 regardless of the severity of the complaint. Most employers are capped at $50,000.

“Discrimination is way too cheap in this country,” said Mark Hanna, vice president of public policy for NELA’s board of directors. “These problems persist because there are no real penalties for employers that discriminate. If we want equal rights at work, discrimination should be expensive.”

“As a result of these laughably small penalties, companies regard discrimination as a fractional cost of business and are willing to take the risk of litigation instead of changing discriminatory employment practices.”

The introduction of the Equal Remedies Act of 2024 is the first time in nearly 20 years that damage caps have been discussed in a significant way. Former Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) introduced the Equal Remedies Act of 2007 to eliminate Title VII and ADA damage caps with co-sponsors including Sens. Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. However, since that time Congress has not addressed the harms caused by damage caps.

NELA looks forward to working in concert with both the House and the Senate to pass this vital legislation and expand remedies for tens of millions of workers.

More information about the Equal Remedies Act, its history, and its potential impact can be found at www.enddamagecapsforworkers.com.

Congress Set To Drop Retraining Program For Workers Harmed By Globalization

Posted on by su4waction

Despite the rise of conservative populism, Republicans aren’t interested in Trade Adjustment Assistance.

As it appeared in HuffPost

By Arthur Delaney

WASHINGTON ― A long-standing benefit for workers laid off due to foreign trade will expire this year unless Congress acts — and it looks like Congress is not going to act.

The Trade Adjustment Assistance program, created in 1964, will begin to phase out in July absent an extension of some kind.

It’s a relatively small program that serves just under 100,000 people most years, but it has also served as a statement that Washington cares about blue collar workers whose lives are upended by free trade.

The program’s survival likely hinges on whether lawmakers include it in a bill designed to boost the domestic semiconductor chip industry in order to improve U.S. competitiveness with China.

House Democrats included Trade Adjustment Assistance as part of their competitiveness bill. The more bipartisan Senate version left the program out. Now members from the two chambers are meeting in what’s known as a conference committee to hash out the differences between the two bills.

The populist wing of the Republican Party, which purports to defend regular Americans from globalization, has had nothing to say about the federal program specifically designed for the workers who are most directly affected by globalization.

Supporters are setting low expectations for a continuation of TAA, which connects layoff victims with training, education and wage subsidies for older workers who wind up having to take lower-paying jobs.

“This conference committee has a plate that is full to overflowing,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a proponent of TAA, told HuffPost. “So what stays in and what goes out is a big tangle at this moment.”

“It has one of the longest shots to be included in the final bill,” conference committee member Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), an opponent of TAA, told HuffPost.

The new version of TAA that Democrats envision would cost about $1 billion per year. It’s a small part of the $66 billion House competitiveness bill and would represent less than 0.02% of the federal budget, but lawmakers have been penny pinchers since inflation shot up in the last six months.

“This is not giant gobs of money here,” Roy Houseman, legislative director for the United Steelworkers union, said in an interview. “It is targeted assistance to help people who’ve worked for decades building and manufacturing goods in this country, and oftentimes they need to make a new career or find a glide path to retirement.”

Houseman himself signed up for trade assistance after losing his job at a paper mill in 2009. In response to a petition from the workers at the plant, the U.S. Department of Labor certified that they met the criteria, since they’d been laid off due to increasing “imports of articles like or directly competitive with” the linerboard made at Houseman’s factory.

Houseman’s days of making cardboard boxes were over. With TAA benefits helping pay his bills, he went back to school and in 2012 completed a master’s degree in public administration ― a useful credential for his current position with the Steelworkers. Houseman recalled that some of his former colleagues sought nursing degrees; one pursued a helicopter pilot’s license.

Three-quarters of the mass layoffs that resulted in certified TAA petitions occurred in the manufacturing industry last year, according to the Labor Department’s most recent annual report. Two-thirds of workers who enrolled in training got new jobs within six months, and only one-third of those new jobs were in manufacturing.

Workers who signed up for TAA last year tended to be older, less white and less educated than the broader civilian workforce. Most either saw their jobs outsourced to another country or got laid off due to imports. The vast majority received job counseling, while 40% got occupational training. A quarter received weekly allowances, and 11% benefited from wage supplements for taking lower-paying jobs.

Republicans have a somewhat technical argument against extending trade assistance. They don’t say it’s a bad program, they just say Congress shouldn’t reauthorize the worker benefit if the U.S. is not currently pursuing any new trade deals with other countries. It doesn’t matter that the previous trade deals remain in effect.

“It’s always been connected with trade negotiations,” Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said. “If there is no trade negotiation going on, then TAA is in abeyance until trade negotiations start happening.”

In other words, workers whose jobs get outsourced shouldn’t get trade benefits when the Biden administration has not asked Congress for permission to negotiate a new trade deal.

“It is just no longer tied to a real trade policy,” Brady said.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said the trade deal argument shows “how little Republicans have cared about people getting laid off because of bad trade deals and tax policy that encourages jobs to go overseas.”

Democrats themselves have criticized TAA in recent years. Not everyone who signs up gets a job, and most who do get jobs wind up with lower wages. Workers who went through the program wound up earning 80% of their previous wage in 2021.

“It’s fair to say that some of the initiatives in the past haven’t worked the way that they were intended,” House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said. “I’m looking for something that’s much more broad-based.”

Neal championed the House bill’s expanded version of TAA, which would widen eligibility to more categories of layoffs, add a child care allowance and streamline the application process. If trade assistance gets reauthorized, House Democrats would probably have to accept a more modest version of the program.

Senate Republicans want the final bill to make it easier for American companies to get around tariffs imposed on Chinese goods, a trade provision that Democrats could use for leverage.

Official Republican sympathy for factory workers may have peaked in 2016, when President-elect Donald Trump personally intervened to stop an Indiana factory from closing and shifting operations to Mexico. Before Trump intervened, the Labor Department said the workers qualified for TAA; hundreds of workers still ultimately got laid off.

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a partnership between manufacturers and the United Steelworkers, said the trade assistance debate reveals a political truth.

“A lot of the appeal some Republicans are trying to make to blue collar workers is rhetorical only,” Paul said. “Because [supporting blue collar workers] does take resources and an ability to invest [in] creating a brighter future for workers that have been laid off as a consequence of trade policy.”