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Race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be indefinite and should have an endpoint. All right, to explain why this case matters so much for national politics, we're joined by CBS News Executive Director of Elections and Surveys Anthony Salvanto. Anthony, my friend, good to see you this morning. So explain how districts are drawn and what the Supreme Court is actually discussing here. Good morning, Vlad. So, look, here's a map of US congressional districts, and you're going to see all these wavy lines because there are always fights about what kinds of voters you can put into districts. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do this hypothetical. Here's a bunch of voters. Let's draw some districts first thing in the morning here, Vlad. Now, let's suppose I take these blue voters, and I put them into districts-- I'm going to draw some lines here-- where the big number of voters are these red figures. The Voting Rights Act has said that on the basis of race, that would dilute the voting power of some voters, and you can't do that. Now, suppose I also try this, and I take all these blue voters right here, and I'm going to draw this very crazy-looking line, and I'm going to put all these blue voters into one district. Well, the Voting Rights Act has said that on the basis of race you can't do that because then it violates their voting power in the state elsewhere. So come out here now back to the national map, and what you're going to see is that these districts down here, especially in Southern states, you've ended up with at least some districts where the voters in the district are majority, in this case, Black voters, and these are the districts that are really going to be in question. All right, so then what are the political implications of all this? So Republicans control the redistricting process in these Southern states, and what could happen is that if this is upended, they could redraw these district lines, and these districts could go away. Now, the key here is that minority voters, Black voters vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. They voted 84% for Democratic congressional candidates last election. So these districts are blue right now. If those go away, Republicans could net maybe, we think, as many as 12 districts out of this area, which would really up their chances of holding on to the house next year. Wow. So this has big, big, big political implications. Anthony Salvanto, always good to see you in studio, my friend. Thank you very much.