The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map, a legal battle over whether states can use race as a factor in drawing electoral lines.
The dispute centers on whether Louisiana lawmakers ran afoul of the Constitution when they adopted a new electoral map in 2024, creating the state’s second majority-Black district.
But the case could have much broader implications for the law and for politics, potentially gutting the remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sharply curtailed in recent years. If the justices decide that lawmakers cannot consider race in drafting maps, redistricting could result in congressional seats flipping from blue to red throughout the country.
The legal battle can be traced back to the 2020 census, which showed an increase in Louisiana’s population of Black adults. While Black Louisianans made up about a third of the state’s population, there was only one majority-Black congressional district out of six districts.
After the census, state lawmakers revisited the map and passed a version that still had only one majority-Black district. Two groups of Black voters then filed federal lawsuits in 2022, asserting that state legislators had violated the Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into one district and diluting their voting power.
The Voting Rights Act, one of the central legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, banned discriminatory practices like literacy tests that had been used to disenfranchise people. It also prohibited measures aimed at denying minority voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
A federal judge agreed, finding that the map likely did violate the statute. State lawmakers then proposed another map in January 2024, which included a second majority-Black district — a long, narrow one that wound from the southeast part of the state to the northwest.
State lawmakers claimed that they had crafted the map with politics, not race, in mind, protecting valuable Republican incumbents, including Speaker Mike Johnson.
But shortly after lawmakers approved that map, a dozen white voters sued, arguing that the new map was an illegal racial gerrymander that had caused them to suffer “unlawful, intentional discrimination based on race.”
In April 2024, a divided panel of three federal judges agreed, striking down the new map. Louisiana then appealed to the Supreme Court. The justices paused the lower court’s order, allowing Louisiana’s new map to be used in the 2024 election. Democrats picked up a seat, as voters in the newly created district elected Cleo Fields, a longtime party figure from Baton Rouge. Mr. Fields is Black.
The justices heard the case, Louisiana v. Callais, in the spring. But instead of issuing a decision in late June or early July, the justices, in a rare move, ordered new arguments for their next term, which began this month. Rearguments can be a signal that the justices are poised to take a broader action in a case. In 2009, the court called for reargument in Citizens United, a campaign finance case that turned from a minor case into a blockbuster, clearing the way for unlimited campaign spending by corporations.
The court offered no explanation for punting on the case, but several weeks later, the justices announced that they would hear arguments on a more expansive question: whether Louisiana’s “intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
That question suggested that the justices appeared to be considering holding the provision of the Voting Rights Act that has been used to challenge redistricting plans unconstitutional.
The court’s conservative justices have long pointed to what they have viewed as a tension between the Voting Rights Act’s goal of protecting minority voting rights and a colorblind conception in the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which requires that the law treat everyone equally.
Two years ago, however, the justices rejected an Alabama voting map, finding that it had diluted the power of Black voters. In that case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who has been a skeptic of the Voting Rights Act for decades, wrote the majority opinion agreeing that lawmakers could take race and other factors into account when redistricting.
The new question in the Louisiana case has shaken up the alliances from the first argument.
In the months since the justices announced that they would hear arguments again, the Louisiana officials who had defended the map have essentially switched sides, aligning with the white voter plaintiffs. They are joined by lawyers for the Trump administration.
In a brief to the court, Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s attorney general, described the structure of the provision of the Voting Rights Act that allows race to be used as a factor in redistricting — Section 2 — as “unworkable and unconstitutional.”
“Race-based redistricting under Section 2 is principally unconstitutional because it inherently rests on a racial stereotype: that all voters of a particular race must — by virtue of their membership in their racial class — think alike, share the same interests and prefer the same political candidates,” she wrote.
The constitutionality of Louisiana’s second majority-minority district is now being defended by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and other voting rights organizations. These groups have argued that the case is about whether minority communities continue to have meaningful representation in politics. They have also raised concerns that gains from the civil rights era were at risk.
In a brief to the court, the civil rights and voting groups asserted that the country had made strides toward racial equality in the decades since the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, but that it was the wrong moment to unravel protections and return to what they called “a blinkered past.”
The groups argued in their brief that Louisiana was taking a “burn-it-all-down approach” that could usher in problems seen before the Voting Right Act.