The Trump administration’s Justice Department on Tuesday released an opinion that tries to carry the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais reasoning beyond voting rights and into employment discrimination law. Signed by T. Elliot Gaiser, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and a former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, the opinion could make it significantly harder for plaintiffs who face employment discrimination to prevail if Republican-appointed judges accept it.
That is why the filing is drawing attention now. Callais was decided as a voting-rights case, and Gaiser’s move asks the legal system to treat it as more than that. The Justice Department opinion focuses on a 1991 federal law that sometimes lets an employee win by showing a practice that causes a disparate impact on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Gaiser’s core argument is that the framework from Callais also reaches those claims.
His own wording makes the shift plain. The 1991 law lets a plaintiff challenge an employer practice that causes a disparate impact, even when there is no proof of intentional bias. That is the same kind of results-based theory Congress built into the Voting Rights Act in 1982, when it said voting-rights plaintiffs did not need to prove racist intent in order to prevail. For 40 years, the Supreme Court read that standard to sometimes require states to draw a minimum number of legislative districts where Black or Latino voters could elect their candidates of choice.
Callais changed that. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion repealed the 1982 amendment’s results test and, in practice, greenlit a new round of gerrymandering by white Southern Republican lawmakers. After the decision, white lawmakers are now free to draw maps that will only elect white Republicans, so long as they say the goal is to lock Democrats out of power and not to target voters of color. The Justice Department is now trying to carry that same logic into workplace cases.
That is the friction inside the administration’s move. Callais was a voting-rights decision, but the new opinion asks courts to use it to narrow a separate civil-rights law covering jobs. The administration is not stopping there either: one day after Gaiser released his opinion, the Transportation Department said it was applying Callais to its regulations. Whether federal courts, especially Republican-controlled ones, embrace that reading is still unclear, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
