Washington — Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared open Wednesday to raising the bar for successfully challenging voting maps under a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, a decision that would weaken the landmark law and limit the consideration of race in the drawing of congressional districts.
The high court appeared sharply divided in the long-running legal fight over Louisiana’s congressional map, which was before the justices for a second time Wednesday. The high court first heard arguments in March over whether Louisiana lawmakers relied too much on race when it crafted new House district lines last year. But the justices declined to issue a decision then, and in August, it posed a new question for consideration: Whether state lawmakers’ intentional drawing of a second majority-minority district — which was undertaken to remedy a likely violation of Section 2 — runs afoul of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
The dispute is likely to have significant ramifications not just for political representation in Louisiana, but also for its potential to upend Section 2, which has become a crucial tool in recent years for minority voters seeking to ensure they have equal opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.
Following more than two hours of oral argument, it appears that Louisiana’s current congressional map, which includes four majority-White districts and two majority-Black districts, will not stand. But less clear is how far the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will go with a decision.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s votes in the case are key, as they joined with the three liberal justices two years ago to reaffirm Section 2 and the framework, in place since 1986, for proving vote dilution under the civil rights law. During the arguments, Kavanaugh seemed open to the Trump administration’s position, which calls for tightening the standards for proving a violation of Section 2.
Kavanaugh called part of their proposed new standard an “innovation.” But he repeatedly pressed lawyers for both sides on a possible end-point for race-based remedies for Section 2 violations, which has involved the drawing of majority-minority districts. In the 2023 case, Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” On Wednesday, he probed whether there should be a time limit as to “the particular application of the statute that entails the intentional, deliberate use of race to sort people.”
But he also appeared uncomfortable with the use of race in redistricting, quoting from a 1994 concurring opinion by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote, “the sorting of persons with an intent to divide by reason of race raises the most serious constitutional questions.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett clarified during the proceedings that the argument pressed by the Justice Department would mark a “modification” of the preconditions used in vote-dilution cases since 1986.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that under the framework proposed by the Justice Department, “the bottom line is just get rid of Section 2,” and Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the Trump administration’s proposal would “swallow Section 2 whole.”
When the Supreme Court considered Louisiana’s map in March, it originally focused on a more narrow set of issues about the House district lines. But after agreeing to hear the case again, it 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. Benjamin Aguinaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general, told the justices that race-based redistricting is “fundamentally contrary to our Constitution.” A decision in the state’s favor could erode Section 2 and deal another blow to the landmark voting rights law more than 10 years after the Supreme Court gutted one of its other 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.
