Future of Voting Rights Act hangs in the balance as Louisiana’s congressional map returns to Supreme Court

Washington — More than a decade after the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, and just two years after it declined to unravel another piece of the law, the Supreme Court will convene on Wednesday to hear a legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional map that could reverberate throughout the nation.

The consolidated cases, known as Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, could weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has been used to ensure minority voters have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.

The legal fight has been before the justices before. In its last term, the Supreme Court weighed whether to leave in place Louisiana’s House map that was redrawn in 2022 to include a second majority-Black district. But the high court declined to issue a ruling then and instead set it for reargument in its new term, which started last week.

The Supreme Court then said in August that it would be considering whether state lawmakers’ intentional drawing of a second majority-minority district — done to address a violation of the Voting Rights Act — runs afoul of the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution.

That new question raises the stakes of the case, as Republicans in Louisiana are urging the high court to prohibit the consideration of race in the drawing of voting lines. A decision in the state’s favor could upend Section 2 and deliver another blow to the landmark civil rights law. 

“Section 2 has had a major impact, definitely in the South, but really nationwide on improving political representation opportunities for voters in a lot of different communities of color and all around the country,” said Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice’s office in Washington, D.C. “A decision that leaves the current understanding of Section 2 in grave doubt opens up unfortunately a lot of chaos throughout the country in a lot of different jurisdictions.”

Arguments before the high court will play out as GOP lawmakers in several states have engaged in politically motivated efforts to recraft their district lines to help Republicans hold onto their majority in the House. The dispute involving Louisiana’s map centers on the use of race in the map-making process, though if the state prevails, it would likely lead to challenges of existing maps that govern voting boundaries for not just Congress, but also local school boards, city councils and state legislatures.

“This is a gut check for the court: Does it want to sign off on another era where we just retreat from the commitment that was made that we’re going to assure we don’t live in a country where we subjugate people based on race, particularly in the political space?” Crayton said.

The fight over Louisiana’s map

The protracted dispute over Louisiana’s congressional map dates back to 2022, when Republican state lawmakers crafted new House district boundaries to adjust for population changes after the 2020 Census. The original map comprised five majority-White districts and one majority-Black district. Nearly one third of Louisiana’s population is Black, according to Census data.

A group of African-American voters challenged those lines as a violation of Section 2 because, they argued, the map diluted Black voting strength. A judge in Baton Rouge agreed and ordered the state to put in place a remedial map with two majority-Black congressional districts.

The new plan adopted by the Louisiana legislature in 2024 reconfigured the state’s 6th Congressional District, which state lawmakers said was an effort to bring it into compliance with the Voting Rights Act. The new District 6 has a Black voting-age population of roughly 51% and stretches across the state from Shreveport, in Louisiana’s northwest corner, to Baton Rouge, in the southeast. Rep. Cleo Fields, a Democrat who is Black, was elected to represent the district last November.

But after the new map was adopted, a group of 12 self-described “non-African-American voters” filed a lawsuit challenging the lines. They alleged that the retooled District 6 was a racial gerrymander that violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

A divided panel of three judges in Shreveport sided with the voters and found that the state legislature relied too much on race when it crafted the new map. 

The case landed before the Supreme Court in its last term, with Louisiana Republicans joining with Black voters and voting rights groups in urging the justices to leave the new congressional map intact. But after the Supreme Court said it would consider the legal fight for a second time — a rare move — state GOP lawmakers abandoned their defense of the map.

Instead, state officials are arguing that Louisiana’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority district violates the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments.

“Our oath is to the Constitution,” Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill, a Republican, and Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga wrote in a filing. “Our Constitution sees neither black voters nor white voters; it sees only American voters.”

The Voting Rights Act

The 14th and 15th Amendments were adopted after the Civil War to guarantee Black people equal protection under the law and the right to vote. The amendments gave Congress the power to enact legislation enforcing their protections, and lawmakers exercised that authority when it passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which is known as the crown jewel of civil rights legislation.

With bipartisan support, Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 and reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006, when President George W. Bush signed it into law.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which protects against the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color, has been a durable centerpiece of the bipartisan legislation passed to make real our shared, national commitment,” a group of former Republican lawmakers who backed the law and its amendments wrote in a brief. “It stands as a monument to Congress’s ability to act as the Constitution’s Framers intended: to identify a national problem, to amass an extensive factual record, and to forge a lasting legislative solution.” 

The Supreme Court will rehear the Louisiana case just over two years after it upheld Section 2 and reaffirmed the framework for proving vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act, which was set out in a 1986 ruling. The high court split 5-4 in that 2023 case, which involved a challenge to Alabama’s congressional map, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices in the majority.

While the high court rejected the chance to weaken Section 2, Kavanaugh suggested that there must be an end-point for the use of race-based remedies.

“[T]he authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future,” Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “But Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.”

Both Kavanaugh and Roberts will be key as the Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of race-based map-making. The two justices were also in the majority when the high court outlawed the use of race as a factor in college admissions, a decision that came down in the same term as the Alabama voting rights dispute.

“If in college admissions, if the quest for diversity — and by diversity, we really mean racial diversity, how someone looks, what their race is, the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, the texture of their hair. It’s how they look, it’s who they are — that’s not a compelling governmental interest to treat people differently, it must follow that treating people differently in order to create election districts that are geographically based will not stand,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, which successfully challenged affirmative action in higher education. Blum is also the director of Project on Fair Representation, a nonprofit organization that opposes racial and ethnic classifications.

Roberts has long denounced racial classifications. In 2006, shortly after he joined the court, the chief justice wrote in a concurring opinion that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” He also authored the majority opinion 12 years ago that dismantled Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, writing, “our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

“America is no longer in the 1960s,” Blum said. “We have moved on, and to base election districts with the primary predicate being to create a racial district, a district in which a racial minority has the opportunity to elect a candidate of choice, that has now been the energy behind creating districts that no longer keep neighborhoods and civic associations and towns and communities together for the purposes of representation.”

It’s unclear how far the Supreme Court will go in a decision, though several conservative justices have endorsed the vision of a “colorblind Constitution.” Louisiana officials and the voters who challenged the redrawn map have argued that any consideration of race when drawing voting lines is unconstitutional.

The Trump administration is backing Louisiana in the case and has urged the Supreme Court to tighten the standards for proving unlawful vote dilution. The framework in place since 1986 requires plaintiffs to show racial polarization in voting, in addition to other preconditions.

“Too often, Section 2 is deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action to undo a State’s constitutional pursuit of political ends. That misuse of Section 2 is unconstitutional,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a filing.

But voting rights groups fear that changing the longstanding framework for how courts evaluate potential violations of Section 2 would undercut its aim of ensuring equal opportunities for minority voters.

“Because it’s so difficult to prove and is one of the only avenues that minority voters have to challenge these districts, it could have potential reverberations to make it incredibly difficult for minority voters to achieve equal representation through district lines,” Sara Rohani, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told CBS News.

A decision from the Supreme Court is expected by the end of June or early July.