The Supreme Court is taking up a major Republican-led challenge to the Voting Rights Act, the landmark legislation of the civil rights movement, that could strike down a key provision of the law banning racial discrimination in redistricting.
The justices will hear arguments for the second time Wednesday in a case over Louisiana’s congressional map, which has two predominantly black districts. A ruling for the state could open the door for the Legislature to redraw congressional maps in the South, potentially boosting Republican electoral prospects by eliminating majority Black and Latino seats that typically tilt in favor of Democrats.
A battle over congressional redistricting has been playing out across the country since mid-decade, after President Donald Trump urged Texas and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their borders to make it easier for the Republican Party to maintain its slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The court’s conservative majority is skeptical of race considerations and recently ended affirmative action in college admissions. Twelve years ago, the court took a sledgehammer to another pillar of the landmark voting law, which required states with a history of racial discrimination to get advance approval from the Justice Department or federal judges before making election-related changes.
The court separately gave state legislatures broad latitude to gerrymander for political purposes, subject only to review by the state’s highest courts. If the court now weakens or strikes down Section 2 of the law, states would not be bound by any restrictions on how they draw electoral districts, an outcome that is expected to lead to extreme gerrymandering by whichever party is in power at the state level.
Just two years ago, the court voted 5-4 to affirm a ruling finding a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over Alabama’s congressional map. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal colleagues in the outcome.
That decision created new districts in both states that sent two more black Democrats to Congress.
Now, however, the court has asked the parties to answer a fundamental question: “Whether the state’s intentional creation of a majority-minority Second Congressional District violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”
In initial arguments in the Louisiana case in March, Roberts sounded skeptical about the second majority-black district, which Democratic Rep. won last year. Cleo Fields preferred. Roberts described the district as a “snake” that stretches more than 200 miles, connecting parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas.
The lawsuit over Louisiana’s congressional districts lasted three years.
The Republican-dominated state Legislature drew a new congressional map in 2022 to account for population shifts reflected in the 2020 census. But the changes essentially preserved the status quo of five white, Republican-majority districts and one Black, Democratic-majority district.
Civil rights advocates won a lower court ruling that the districts likely discriminated against black voters.
The state ultimately drafted a new map to comply with the court ruling and protect its influential Republican lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson. But white voters in Louisiana claimed in their separate lawsuit that race was the predominant factor. A three-judge bench agreed, leading to the current case at the Supreme Court.
Gerrymandering is the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries to favor a specific political party or group.
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