Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on SCOTUSblog, a Dispatch Media company.
In the case of Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court on Wednesday nullified a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the result of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices left in place a federal-court ruling that barred the state from using the map, which had produced a second Black-majority district, in future elections. Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA), as Louisiana and the challengers had urged the court to do, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent (joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) that the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito had rendered the provision “all but a dead letter.”
The decision serves as the latest, and likely final, chapter in a lengthy fight stemming from Louisiana’s effort to redraw its congressional map after the 2020 census. The initial map adopted in 2022 contained only one Black-majority district among six districts allotted to the state. A group of Black voters, who comprise roughly one-third of Louisiana’s population, went to federal court, alleging that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits voting discrimination.
A federal judge agreed that the 2022 map probably violated Section 2, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit affirmed that ruling. It ordered Louisiana to craft a new map by January 2024, or risk the court drawing one itself for the state.
The map Louisiana produced in 2024 created a second Black-majority district, which culminated in the November 2024 election of Cleo Fields, a former congressman who had previously represented another Black-majority district during the 1990s.
The 2024 map also sparked the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Filed by a group of voters who identify as “non-African American,” they argued that the 2024 map violated the Equal Protection Clause by sorting voters based on race. A three-judge federal district court agreed and blocked the use of the 2024 map in future elections, but the Supreme Court, in a divided decision, temporarily stayed that ruling in May 2024.
The Court granted review and heard oral arguments for the first time in March 2025. In defending the 2022 map, Louisiana argued that once lower courts found the 2022 map likely invalid and ordered a new map with a second Black-majority district, its aim was not racial but to shield the state’s influential Republican incumbents in Congress, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, a member of the House Appropriations Committee.
The challengers to the 2024 map told the justices that it was “utterly implausible” to claim that race and politics were equally responsible for the redesign.
Departing from their usual practice, the justices did not issue a decision before the court’s summer recess last year. Instead, they issued a terse order setting the case for a second round of argument in the fall. They later instructed the parties to submit new briefs addressing whether “the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates” either the 14th Amendment or the 15th Amendment, which prohibits denying or restricting the right to vote on account of race.
By the time the justices heard the second round of oral arguments in October, Black voters were the sole litigants defending the 2024 map. Louisiana and the “non-African American” voters contended that race-based redistricting is unconstitutional, even if undertaken to satisfy Section 2. Although the Trump administration did not urge striking down Section 2 entirely, it pressed the Court to uphold the three-judge district court’s decision.
In a 36-page opinion, Alito wrote that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” The question, he stated, is “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”
As a general rule, Alito argued, Section 2 of the VRA guarantees voters, including minority voters, the ability to vote for their preferred candidate, but a candidate’s chances can be affected by the permissible considerations in drawing redistricting maps—such as protecting incumbents or boosting a party’s representation. And under the Constitution, he continued, a violation of Section 2 occurs only when “the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred”—for instance, when multiple map options contain majority-minority districts, yet the state cannot provide a legitimate justification for rejecting all of them.
In this case, Alito asserted, Louisiana’s aim in adopting the 2024 map was “racial.” The state enacted it after the lower court’s finding that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and sought to avoid a different map that would have created a second Black-majority district but would have endangered one of the Legislature’s influential incumbents it sought to protect.
The state lacked the kind of compelling interest that could justify race-based considerations in drawing the 2024 map, Alito wrote, because—among other things—the plaintiffs challenging the 2022 map did not present an illustrative plan that would have protected the Republican incumbents, and because the lower court relied on the “sordid history” of intentional discrimination by Louisiana officials prior to the Voting Rights Act’s passage, even though Section 2 concentrates on “current conditions.” “And none of the historical evidence offered by the plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map resulted from intentional racial discrimination.”
“In sum,” Alito concluded, “because the Voting Rights Act did not compel Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in drawing SB8. That map is an unconstitutional gerrymander, and its use would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”
In a solemn tone, Kagan read a summary of her 48-page dissent from the bench—a clear sign of her strong disagreement with the majority’s ruling. “The Voting Rights Act,” she wrote, “is—or, more precisely now, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’” Yet the standards the court imposed on Wednesday, she argued, “will effectively insulate any practice, including any districting scheme, claimed by a State to have any race-neutral justification. That justification can reside in traditional redistricting criteria, or it can rest in politics and partisanship. As to the latter, the State need merely declare a partisan gerrymander,” she said. “Assuming the State has produced no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect), Section 2 will play no role.”
In another sign of her disagreement with the majority, Kagan omitted the customary “respectfully” from her closing, writing simply, “I dissent.”
