Washington — The Supreme Court on Wednesday is considering for the second time a long-running legal fight over Louisiana’s congressional map, a case that could have significant ramifications not just for political representation in the state, but also for its potential to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
At issue in the case is whether state lawmakers’ intentional drawing of a second majority-minority district — undertaken to remedy a likely violation of Section 2 — runs afoul of the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution.
The high court initially heard arguments in March over whether to leave in place the House district lines re-drawn in 2024 to include a second majority-Black district. But the justices did not issue a decision in the case and instead scheduled it for re-argument in its new term, which began last week.
The case originally focused on a more narrow set of issues about the map, but in August, the Supreme Court asked Louisiana officials and voters involved in the challenge to address whether race-based redistricting comports with the Constitution.
That new question upped the stakes of the case, as Republicans in Louisiana urge the Supreme Court to forbid the consideration of race in the drawing of voting lines. A decision in the state’s favor could upend Section 2 and deal another blow to the landmark voting rights law more than 10 years after the Supreme Court gutted one of its key provisions.
The legal fight over Louisiana’s congressional map dates back to 2022, when GOP lawmakers in the state drew new House district lines after the 2020 Census. That map consisted of 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 the map as a violation of Section 2 because it diluted Black voting strength, they argued. A judge in Baton Rouge agreed, finding the map deprived Black voters of the chance to elect their preferred candidate, and she ordered the state to put a remedial map in place with a second majority-minority congressional district.
The new plan adopted by the Louisiana legislature in 2024 reconfigured the state’s 6th Congressional District, which state lawmakers said was in 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. Congressman Cleo Fields, a Democrat who is Black, was elected to represent the district last November.
State lawmakers said they had a political goal in mind, too, when recrafting the voting boundaries: to protect key Republican incumbents in the House, namely House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Rep. Julia Letlow, who sits on the powerful Appropriations panel.
But after the new map was adopted, a group of 12 self-described “non-African-American” voters challenged the boundaries, alleging the new District 6 was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 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, and Louisiana Republicans joined with Black voters and voting rights groups in urging the justices to leave the new congressional map in place. But with the case set to be reargued, and the focus now on the constitutionality of race-based redistricting, state GOP lawmakers are no longer defending their district lines.
Instead, state officials are arguing that the there should be “zero tolerance for any consideration of race.”
“[R]ace-based redistricting mandated by Section 2 is unconstitutional because it violates basic equal protection principles: It uses race as a stereotype, uses race as a negative, and has no logical end point,” Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill, a Republican, and Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga wrote in a filing. “Accordingly, Section 2 is unconstitutional insofar as it requires race-based redistricting. “
The Trump administration is backing Louisiana and the “non-African-American” voters in the case and has urged the Supreme Court to tighten the standards for proving unlawful vote dilution under Section 2. 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 lawyers for the voters who challenged the initial district lines, which were then redrawn to include a second majority-Black district, argue the new map largely prioritized Republicans’ political goals of protecting key incumbents. Any consideration of race, they said, was limited and driven by a compelling interest in addressing a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
“[T]he notion that the sun has set on the need for race-conscious remedial redistricting for identified instances of racial vote dilution is contrary to both the fact of ongoing discrimination in Louisiana and the text and purpose of [Section 2] as it was amended in 1982 and has been consistently interpreted by this Court ever since,” lawyers for the Black Louisianans wrote in a filing.
They warned that removing Section 2’s protections for minority voters in Louisiana “will not end discrimination there or lead to a race-blind society, but it may well lead to a severe decrease in minority representation at all levels of government in many parts of the country.”
Without the provision, “jurisdictions could simply eliminate minority opportunity districts even where they remain necessary for voters of color to have any opportunity to elect candidates of choice, wiping out minority representation and re-segregating legislatures, city councils, and school boards — as some have recently attempted to do,” lawyers wrote.
The Supreme Court is re-hearing the case involving Louisiana’s map just over two years after it upheld Section 2 and reaffirmed the framework for proving vote dilution set out in the 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. He wrote in a concurring opinion that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”
During Wednesday’s arguments, Kavanaugh said the Court has said race-based remedies are permissible, sometimes for a long period of time, but they should not be indefinite and should have an end point, and he asked when that should be.
NAACP Legal Defense Fund president Janai Nelson, who is arguing for the group of Black voters, said there’s no precedent to suggest that a statute must dissolve on its own because race is part of the remedy. And she argued that the nondiscrimination element of the 15th Amendment is “a permanent right, and so should be the protection that Section 2 affords.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that Nelson was saying that Section 2 is itself not a remedy that should have an end point, but was instead more of a mechanism — a kind of “check-in” on “where we might need to do work.” She compared it to a “tape measure” that “doesn’t need a life cycle.” Nelson agreed and noted that Section 2 cases have fallen in the last decade.
Both Kavanaugh and Roberts will be key as the Supreme Court weighs the constitutionality of race-based map-making. The two justices also voted to outlaw 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.
Roberts, in particular, has long denounced racial classifications. In a 2006 concurring opinion, the chief justice wrote, “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” He also authored the 2013 majority opinion 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.”
A decision from the Supreme Court is expected by the end of June or early July.
