The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority on Wednesday struck down a Louisiana congressional map, over dissent that said the ruling made a key section of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter” and marked the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition” of the act.
Justice Samuel Alito said in his opinion for the six-justice majority that the act didn’t require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, so there was no compelling interest justifying the state’s use of race in creating the map, and it’s therefore an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The key part of the act at issue, Section 2, prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices or procedures, and it had become even more important to voting rights claims after the Supreme Court gutted another provision of the act in 2013.
Alito wrote that Section 2 “was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent for the three Democratic appointees that the ruling renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter” and that the consequences “are likely to be far-reaching and grave.” She wrote that in states “where that law continues to matter — the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting — minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”
The justices were supposed to rule on the map last term. But the court, signaling that it might further gut the act, set the case for re-argument this term and asked the parties to answer a broader question: “Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.”
Those amendments followed the Civil War and, as Chief Justice John Roberts recounted in his latest year-end report on the federal judiciary, they did the work of “guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law and granting the right to vote to Black men.”
The appeal decided Wednesday, called Louisiana v. Callais, involved Louisiana’s map that had two majority-Black districts out of a total of six.
The state defended the map last term, but this term it said the map violated the Constitution. At the October hearing, Justice Clarence Thomas asked the state’s solicitor general, Benjamin Aguiñaga, why Louisiana had switched sides. Aguiñaga said the court’s reformulation of the legal question presented in the case “requires us to give the Court our honest answer to that question.”
Aguiñaga argued that Section 2, “insofar as it requires race-based redistricting, is unconstitutional.”
During the hearing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pushed the notion that race-based remedies in the law should end. Responding to Kavanaugh’s concern, Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund said that curbing Section 2 would be “pretty catastrophic,” and that “any further neutering of” the law “would resurrect the 15th Amendment as a mere parchment promise.”
The decision comes ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, as states around the country have sought to redraw their maps. The justices have already weighed in on the redistricting effort in Texas, where Republicans made a new map in response to President Donald Trump’s request. In November, a lower court panel led by a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the map was likely an illegal racial gerrymander. But in December, the high court’s Republican-appointed majority put it back in play, reasoning that it was motivated by partisanship, not race.
In siding with Texas, justices in the majority suggested they would similarly side with California’s Democratic-friendly redistricting effort, and the court did so when it rejected a Republican appeal in February.
Then in March, the Supreme Court backed Republican efforts to maintain a safe congressional seat in New York, splitting 6-3 over dissent from the Democratic appointees.
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