The Supreme Court on Wednesday dejected Louisiana’s Congress is being portrayed as an unconstitutional racist gerrymander while overhauling the legal framework that courts have used for four decades to evaluate minority voting rights claims under the law Voting Rights Act.
The 6-3 decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, will make it much more difficult for plaintiffs to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory and could alter the legislative plans of Congress and states across the country.
The case arose from Louisiana’s 2022 recount Redistributionwhich created a map – known as HB1 — contains only one majority-black district, although African Americans are represented about a third the population of the state.
A group of black voters led by the plaintiff Press Robinsonfiled a federal application suitarguing that the map violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. The complaint states: “Louisiana’s new congressional map packs black voters into the state’s only majority-black district and distributes other black voters into districts that extend into predominantly white communities in the south, west and north of the state.” In June 2022, the district court agreed that the map likely violated the law and ordered Louisiana to draw a new district with a second majority-black district.
After appeals delayed the case beyond the 2022 election, the Louisiana legislature enacted a replacement map in 2024. SB8adding a second majority-black district that stretches about 250 miles from Shreveport in the northwest part of the state to Baton Rouge in the southeast. The legislature chose this unusual configuration, Louisiana recognizedto protect the districts of three prominent Republican incumbents: House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Budget Committee member Julia Letlow.
A other group of Voters, led by plaintiff Phillip Callais, then sued in federal court in the Western District of Louisiana, arguing that SB8’s expanded Second District was an unconstitutional racist gerrymander. A three-judge federal panel agreed. Now he’s defending the map he was supposed to draw: Louisiana Appealed to the Supreme Court, along with the Robinson plaintiffs who had done so intervened to defend the second majority-black district they had originally sought.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday confirmed the lower court’s ruling against SB8, thereby restructuring the test established in the court’s 1986 decision Thornburg vs. Gingleswhich Section 2 has since regulated cases of vote dilution.
Under the revised framework, plaintiffs must now demonstrate that alternative maps meet all of a state’s legitimate districting goals — including partisan goals like protecting incumbents — without using race as a selection criterion. Plaintiffs must also demonstrate through a party affiliation analysis that racially polarized elections cannot be explained by partisanship alone. “If a Section 2 plaintiff cannot separate race from the state’s race-neutral considerations, including policy,” Alito wrote, “then Section 2 cannot impose liability.”
The majority held that Section 2 imposes liability only when evidence “supports a strong inference that the State intentionally selected its districts to provide fewer opportunities for minority voters because of their race.”
Applying this test, the court concluded that the case was Louisiana previous map did not actually violate Section 2, meaning the state had no compelling reason to rely on race in drawing SB8.
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote a sharp dissent in which she accused the majority of effectively reverting Section 2 to its pre-1982 state, when plaintiffs had to prove discriminatory intent – a standard that Congress explicitly rejected when it changed the law this year.
“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a state can systematically weaken the voting rights of minority citizens without legal consequences,” Kagan wrote. She said the ruling caps a years-long project by the court to strike down the Voting Rights Act after its 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder Repeal of the preclearance provisions of the law and its 2021 ruling Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee Limiting the scope of Section 2 with respect to voting restrictions.
President Donald Trump praised He weighed in on the ruling in a post on his Truth Social account on Wednesday, calling it “a HUGE WIN for equal protection under the law” and thanking Alito for “writing this important and appropriate opinion.” Trump said the decision “returns the Voting Rights Act to its original intent, which was to protect against intentional racial discrimination.” His opinion did not address the 1982 legislative changes in which Congress explicitly reworded Section 2 to cover discriminatory effects, not just intent — a story that Kagan’s dissent extensively highlighted.
Many critics disagreed.
“This decision is a profound betrayal of the legacy of the civil rights movement. By gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has weakened the most important legal tool that voters of color rely on to challenge discriminatory maps and voting systems,” Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement opinion.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote: “Today, just 60 years later, with the stroke of a pen, this rogue, irresponsible court has effectively signed the Voting Rights Act’s death certificate, undoing decades of Black progress.”
