Two things were obvious at Wednesday morning’s Supreme Court argument in Louisiana v. Callais, a case asking the Court to abolish longstanding safeguards against racially gerrymandered legislative maps.

The first thing is that the Court will split along party lines, with all six Republicans voting to destroy the federal Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) restrictions on racial gerrymandering, and all three Democrats in dissent. The other thing is that there is no consensus among the Republicans about how they should write an opinion gutting these protections.

While all six Republican justices almost certainly walked into Wednesday’s argument with a particular result in mind, they had wildly divergent theories of how to get there.

Justice Samuel Alito seemed to argue that maps that exclude Black

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