The problem you keep running into is that you seem to disagree that gerrymandering is okay. SCOTUS notionally struck down racial gerrymandering as a means to further partisan gerrymandering, which they explicitly endorse. That is the core problem here, no maps or design principles will get around this.
Gerrymandering is taking up an outsize amount of the narrative here. The VRA by its terms doesn't talk about gerrymandering. It's about discriminating against voters on the basis of their race. The tools of gerrymandering
are diluting or enhancing the influence of particular voters
based on their location. So certainly we're not talking about two entirely separate things. But their relationship is far from automatic. The VRA was written with an eye towards the not-even-post-Jim Crow South, where black voter suppression was a lot more severe than gerrymandering.
And for the record, the Supreme Court says that (their) restricting partisan gerrymandering is non-justiciable: they'll never be able to rule properly on what the "correct" number of R/D districts should be in a given case, so they're going to ignore such claims. That's not an endorsement of partisan gerrymandering. It's more or less the judicial equivalent of "sir, this is a Wendy's."
If you want to make sense of what the Supreme Court is doing you need to know where they're coming from.
You're already aware this case is the progeny of a long line of litigation and judicially-imposed maps, a critical facet is that the Supreme Court's most direct power is over the federal district courts - here, it's not putting a new burden or requirement on state legislatures. And this is even though the
actual holding of this case is that the map Louisiana was set to use (by lower judicial order) violated the Fifteenth Amendment by discriminating on the basis of race.
This case was about the Court imposing a new standard for courts to apply in VRA cases where the Plaintiff claims that a State is discriminating against voters on account of race and the State should therefore redistrict one (or more) additional majority-minority district. Essentially, they wanted to rein in the majority-minority district judicial remedy by heightening the standard for it to be imposed by lower courts.
Oh wow, US Supreme Court went weird to not overturn Allen v. Milligan that is obviously in conflict with Louisiana v. Callais.
This is at least the second time you said this in this thread, and now with feigned surprise. The cases are not in conflict, except in so far as the earlier case didn't explicitly follow the new factual burden imposed on plaintiffs by the later case. Factual differences are exactly what courts don't overturn prior cases over.
Unless you're just assuming that majority-minority districts are unconstitutional under
Louisiana. Which the Supreme Court very strenuously avoided saying, because it's not the holding.
I do think that prolong political gridlock would force republicans and democrats agree to end the gerrymandering for all of congressional seats as trade for stability in the country, so it means VRA would be reformed when they legislate the bill to ban on gerrymandering and compliance with constitutional requirement.
Prolonged gridlock is more or less what we've always had, I don't think this time is when that's going to translate into partisans setting aside their differences, to pass a law that says what various states already have (rather ineffectively). The way you "ban" gerrymandering is you take the redistricting power away from the state legislature, and let somebody else do it. Then you just don't call the result a gerrymander...
Furthermore, nobody is getting a bill through this or any conceivable next Congress to significantly modify the core provisions of the VRA. Maybe if the Democrats sweep and get a veto proof supermajority in this year's election? I don't think it's possible. Maybe a Democratic trifecta in '29 would try to modify something as serious, but that would be attendant to all kinds of extreme steps like adding states (to pack the Senate), nuking the filibuster, and packing the Supreme Court.
If you want a prediction out of me: expect some amusingly easy pleading under this purportedly-according-to-critics-impossible
Louisiana standard. The heightened capabilities of gerrymandering (i.e., more lopsidedly partisan results) recently come from computers and math. Those same tools are available to plaintiffs in future cases. I'm not saying it'll be as easy pleading as it was in the past, but it's going to be close to trivial for plaintiffs to gin up the quantitative evidence and counterfactuals about voters and districts that
Louisiana is demanding. Where I think you will see a difference is in federal district court orders resolving these cases - they're going to rarely, if ever, order majority-minority districts explicitly. The more aggressive ones will impose maps of their design/choosing directly (that... perhaps... include additional majority minority districts), the less aggressive ones will order legislatures to redistrict without expressly stating majority-minority. The
Gingles standard's fit to these cases is going to get worse.
