What the “Kids and Gerrymandering” Argument Gets Catastrophically Wrong
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
The premise of Bruce Lesley’s recent Substack piece is sympathetic on its surface: children are unrepresented, politicians ignore them, and redistricting makes it worse. He’s not entirely wrong about the problem. But his diagnosis is wrong, his remedies lead nowhere useful, and the analysis stops exactly where it gets uncomfortable.
Here is what he missed, and why it matters more than anything he said.
What Callais Actually Did
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais — a 6-3 decision split along ideological lines, with the majority authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The court struck down Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which had created a second majority-Black district, holding it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for the majority, Alito held that because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create that additional district, no compelling interest justified the state’s use of race in drawing it.
The dissent, from Justice Kagan joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, argued the majority had effectively rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” That framing has dominated coverage of the decision — including Lesley’s piece.
What has been largely missing from that coverage, including Lesley’s, is an honest account of what Section 2 became in practice: a tool for racial sorting of voters that served partisan political architecture as much as it served civil rights goals. Race-sorting voters to produce race-sorted outcomes is, by definition, racial sorting — regardless of which party benefits or which demographic is targeted. The Callais ruling does not prevent a single voter of any race from casting a ballot. It prevents state legislatures from sorting voters by race to produce predetermined racial outcomes — a distinction Lesley’s piece never makes.
On Apportionment: A Conflation Worth Naming
Lesley spends considerable time on Evenwel v. Abbott (2016) and the ongoing effort by some Republican strategists to draw district lines based on voter-eligible population rather than total population — which would exclude all 75 million American children from apportionment counts. He connects this to Thomas Hofeller’s strategy documents and the Trump administration’s push for citizenship data in the Census.
This is a legitimate concern, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Children should be counted in apportionment. Evenwel was decided 9-0 and remains good law. The constitutional text is clear: representation is apportioned based on the whole number of persons, not voters.
But here is the conflation at the center of Lesley’s argument: the protection of children in apportionment counts has nothing to do with racial gerrymandering remedies under Section 2 of the VRA. These are separate legal doctrines. Callais does not touch Evenwel. Children’s standing in apportionment is not contingent on the survival of race-conscious redistricting. Lesley stacks these arguments together to build a scarier composite picture than either supports on its own. The child apportionment threat is real. The Callais ruling is not its cause, and racial gerrymandering was never its remedy.
The Primary Electorate Problem — and Who’s Really Offering Solutions
Lesley cites data showing that just 7% of eligible voters cast ballots that effectively decided 87% of House races through safe-district primaries, with the average primary voter age of 59 compared to 48 for the general electorate. Parents with young children are dramatically underrepresented. He’s right about all of this.
But notice what he doesn’t say: who has kept the primary system closed. Independent voters — the fastest-growing voter registration category in the country — are locked out of primaries in most states. That lockout is actively defended by both major parties, whose institutional interests depend on keeping the primary electorate small, ideological, and controllable. The progressive advocacy infrastructure that funds redistricting litigation and groups like FairVote — which pushes ranked-choice voting as the preferred structural fix and is heavily backed by left-aligned donors — is not a neutral reform movement. It is a faction of one party’s coalition proposing solutions that happen to benefit that coalition.
The actual structural problem is a two-party duopoly that suppresses competition. The remedy is not ranked-choice voting designed by one side’s consultants. It is making room for additional parties and ensuring that independent voters — who represent the fastest-growing share of the electorate precisely because they are alienated from both parties — have a real voice in the only elections that actually determine most outcomes. Competitive elections create accountability. Accountability is what children need. More structural engineering by either party’s preferred reform apparatus is not.
The Scorecard Measures the Wrong Things
Lesley’s most concrete empirical claim is that members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus score highest on First Focus Campaign for Children’s Champions for Children legislative scorecard — year over year, without exception. He presents this as evidence that racial gerrymandering against minority representatives is directly harmful to children.
The scorecard measures vote alignment with First Focus’s legislative priorities, which are heavily weighted toward federal spending programs: the Child Tax Credit, CHIP, Medicaid, SNAP, pre-K funding, child care subsidies. A member who votes against expanding any of these programs scores poorly regardless of what else they do for children. A member who champions family court reform, parental rights legislation, foster care accountability, or enforcement of court-ordered parenting time does not appear on this scorecard at all.
The scorecard measures one slice of children’s policy and presents it as the whole. It is, in effect, a Democratic Party voting record tracker with children’s branding. That does not make the legislators who score well bad people or indifferent to children. It means the metric is incomplete — and building a constitutional argument about racial map-drawing on top of an incomplete metric produces a conclusion that the data cannot actually support.
The Historical Analogies Don’t Hold
Lesley invokes both Derry and Selma as cautionary precedents for what happens when legitimate representation is systematically denied. Selma is fair. Americans did shed blood over voting rights. Federal courts have a legitimate and ongoing role in blocking genuine vote suppression — the kind that prevents people from casting a ballot at all. That is not in dispute.
Derry is a different matter. The conflict in Northern Ireland was not primarily a story about racial gerrymandering. It was the compounded product of centuries of colonial dispossession, the engineered starvation of the Irish Famine, the partition of a country against the will of a numerical majority, and deep religious divisions between communities whose identities had been forged in opposition to each other across generations. British policy did not merely draw unfair district lines. It starved people, displaced them, and suppressed their cultural and religious identity across centuries. Reaching for Derry to frame a dispute about Louisiana’s congressional map is not a historical lesson. It is a rhetorical escalation that substitutes emotional weight for analytical precision.
The more honest version of the historical argument is simpler: when people are genuinely excluded from political power through documented, intentional suppression of their right to vote, federal courts should intervene. The original Voting Rights Act was necessary and was, by most measures, successful at achieving its core purpose. The question — which the Callais majority was directly grappling with — is whether that success means race-conscious remedies should be permanent features of American law, or whether the constitutional rule against racial sorting should eventually apply universally. That is a legitimate legal question. It does not require invoking Bloody Sunday to answer it.
The Real Child Welfare Crisis the Article Ignores
Here is what a genuine children’s rights analysis of American politics looks like — and it has nothing to do with congressional maps.
The numbers on foster care alone are indictment enough. As of fiscal year 2024, approximately 329,000 children were in the U.S. child welfare system. About 30% of all children who exited foster care that year had spent more than two years in the system — roughly 64,000 children. Approximately 35,000 spent three or more years. Nearly 35,000 additional children remained in foster care despite being legally free for adoption. In fiscal year 2024, 15,379 youth simply aged out — no reunification, no adoption, no permanent home. Just a birthday and a door.
What happens to those children? Between 22% and 30% become homeless during the transition to adulthood, according to a 2024 study — compared to a 4% lifetime homelessness prevalence in the general population. Longer-term, research estimates that 31% to 46% of youth who exit foster care experience homelessness by age 26. Among homeless youth with a foster care history, they are more likely to have spent time in detention or prison, less likely to be in school or employed, and more likely to be receiving government assistance. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimated in 2023 that of children who ran away from child welfare placements, approximately 19% were likely victims of sex trafficking.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation has calculated that if youth who age out of foster care had the same outcomes as youth who didn’t, American taxpayers would save $4.1 billion.
Politicians who cannot find the will to fix a $4.1 billion failure want you to believe the problem is a congressional district map.
And it is not only the foster care system. Children disappear from schools when a parent is incapacitated by addiction or has simply stopped showing up, and schools collect the funding anyway. Police in most jurisdictions have no policy framework for intervening when a child goes missing from their enrollment record without explanation. These are not rural failures or urban failures. They are systemic failures that exist across every income level and every district composition — failures that no redistricting outcome has ever fixed or will fix.
Maryland Is Exhibit A
Lesley’s implicit argument is that minority representation in Congress produces better outcomes for children in those communities. Maryland tests that claim directly, and Maryland fails it.
Maryland has a Democratic supermajority in Annapolis, a Democratic governor, a Democratic attorney general, and Democratic majorities in every major county government. Montgomery County — one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, represented by exactly the kinds of legislators who score highest on Lesley’s preferred scorecard — has a family court system that is functionally unenforced. Parents with signed court orders watch them ignored. Attorneys bill by the hour. Guardians ad litem collect fees. Court-appointed evaluators charge thousands per report. The professionals profit. The children wait.
Maryland’s own budget documents acknowledge the foster care failure in language that should embarrass every elected official in Annapolis. As of February 2025, of the 3,699 children in out-of-home care, 45.6% — nearly 1,700 children — had been in care for more than two years. The Department of Human Services called this figure “simply egregious and unacceptable” in its own budget submission. That assessment came from the agency that produced the outcome, under the administration that oversees it, in a state that has had unified Democratic control for generations.
If racial representation in Congress were the variable that determined child welfare outcomes, Maryland’s children should be thriving. The data says otherwise. The variable that determines outcomes is not the racial composition of a congressional delegation. It is whether elected officials — of any race, in any district, at any level of government — face real consequences for failure. In Maryland, they do not. The system is too insulated, too profitable for too many people, and too far removed from any electoral accountability mechanism to reform itself from within.
Gerrymandering makes that accountability problem worse, because it reduces competitive pressure on incumbents. But the solution to reduced competitive pressure is not racial map engineering. It is competitive elections — which means more parties, independent voters with real primary access, and a political system that stops rewarding incumbents for managing dysfunction rather than solving it.
Parental Alienation: The Invisible Abuse
The progressive frame on child welfare focuses almost exclusively on material deprivation — poverty, food insecurity, housing instability. These are real. But the systematic erasure of a parent from a child’s life, enforced through court inaction and judicial discretion, produces documented harm that the policy world treats as an afterthought — regardless of who represents the district.
Peer-reviewed research finds that 13.4% of parents and their children have been victims of parental alienating behavior, with nearly half of those cases classified as severe. Documented outcomes for alienated children include anxiety, depression, substance abuse, declines in academic performance, and suicidality. A 2024 study found that parental alienation fits within the existing factor structure of the Adverse Childhood Experiences scale — and that a scale including parental alienation items explained more variance in child outcomes than the original ACEs scale alone. The standard trauma framework was underestimating it.
This is not a problem concentrated in poor districts with minority representation. It is a problem in Montgomery County, Maryland. It is a problem in Fairfax County, Virginia. It is a problem in Westchester County, New York. The attorneys, guardians ad litem, and court-appointed evaluators who profit from prolonged custody conflicts are equally present in affluent majority-white jurisdictions with highly educated, well-compensated judges. The exploitation is not a function of poverty or race. It is a function of a professional class that faces no accountability — to outcomes, to court orders, or to the children nominally at the center of every proceeding.
No redistricting outcome changes that. Only accountability does.
Campaign Finance Is the Real Representation Problem
Lesley gestures at money in politics but doesn’t follow it to its conclusion. Children don’t vote. Children don’t donate. Children don’t lobby. The family law bar does. Guardian ad litem associations do. Court-appointed evaluator networks do. The vendors who profit from child welfare system complexity do.
Dark money doesn’t flow to protect children. It flows to protect systems that profit from children’s instability. A member of the Congressional Black Caucus representing a 65% Black district in Louisiana is no more likely to reform family court, fix the foster care system, or address parental alienation than a white Republican representing a gerrymandered rural district. Both are accountable to donors and party infrastructure. Neither is accountable to the children the system is theoretically designed to serve.
The redistricting argument is a category error. It assumes that changing the racial composition of a congressional delegation will produce policy outcomes that sixty years of federal legislation, court decisions, and agency action have failed to produce in the communities that delegation represents. There is no evidence for this. There is substantial evidence that the institutions responsible for child welfare — family courts, child protective services, foster care systems — are structurally captured by professional interests that benefit from dysfunction, and that no redistricting outcome changes that calculus.
What a Genuine Children’s Rights Framework Requires
If you actually want to write about children and political representation, here is the honest version.
Children need constitutional due process in family court. They need enforced court orders. They need a system where “best interests of the child” is operationalized by evidence and outcome data rather than judicial preference and professional habit. They need a foster care system that is audited, accountable, and funded based on permanency outcomes rather than case volume. They need schools that track students who disappear from enrollment rather than collecting per-pupil funding for children who are no longer there. They need legislators who will follow the $4.1 billion cost of foster care failure back to its source rather than gesturing at a map.
They need elected officials who can be voted out when they fail. That requires competitive elections. Competitive elections require more than two viable parties and an electorate that includes independent voters in the contests that actually decide outcomes. That is a structural reform argument — but it is one that applies accountability pressure to incumbents rather than engineering a predetermined racial outcome in a congressional map.
None of what children actually need requires a racial composition requirement for congressional districts. All of it requires political courage that neither party has demonstrated — and, notably, that the party governing Maryland’s family courts has spectacularly failed to summon across several generations of unchallenged power.
The Callais ruling is a redistricting case about the appropriate use of race in drawing legislative lines. Turning it into a children’s rights emergency is a rhetorical move that lets every politician who has failed American children off the hook by pointing at a map.
The map is not the problem. The accountability vacuum is. And no redistricting remedy — racial or partisan, court-ordered or legislatively drawn — fills an accountability vacuum. Only voters do. And voters can only do that job when they have real choices, real competition, and elected officials who know that failure has consequences.
That is what children are waiting for. Not a better map.
Sources
Supreme Court of the United States, Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24-109, decided April 29, 2026. SCOTUSblog case summary and Amy Howe analysis, April 29, 2026. Constitution Center, “The Supreme Court’s Callais Decision Sets New Framework for Racial Gerrymandering,” May 1, 2026. Evenwel v. Abbott, 578 U.S. 54 (2016). Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019). Fox News, “Supreme Court Rules on Key Voting Rights Act Rule,” April 30, 2026. NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Louisiana v. Callais case page and FAQ. Brennan Center for Justice, Louisiana v. Callais case summary.
Unite America Institute, primary voter participation analysis. Bipartisan Policy Center, primary voter age data. First Focus Campaign for Children, Champions for Children Legislative Scorecard (multiple years).
Administration for Children and Families, Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) FY2024 Dashboard, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Annie E. Casey Foundation, “What Happens to Youth Aging Out of Foster Care,” November 2025. Christian Alliance for Orphans, “US Foster Care Statistics 2025,” updated November 2025. Youth.gov, “Child Welfare System.” National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2023 trafficking estimate.
Maryland Department of Human Services, FY2026 Operating Budget Testimony, Social Services Administration (N00B), February 2025.
Harman, Jennifer J., et al., “Prevalence of Parental Alienation Drawn from a Representative Poll,” Journal of Family Psychology, 2016. Harman, Jennifer J., et al., “Prevalence of Adults Who Are the Targets of Parental Alienating Behaviors and Their Impact,” Children and Youth Services Review, 2019. Institute for Family Studies, “New Research on the Science of Parental Alienation,” September 2022. Balmer, Matthew J., et al., “Pilot Study of Parental Alienation Items in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Scale,” Journal of Affective Disorders, 2024. PMC/NIH, “Parental Alienation — A Valid Experience?” 2024.
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