HUNT VALLEY, Md. (TNND) — The Supreme Court may very well upend one of the last remaining central pieces of the Voting Rights Act – that elections or voting practices cannot discriminate based on race.
And, in doing so, the high court may bolster efforts by Republican state legislatures to redraw congressional maps to expand the party’s majority.
The justices’ ruling could actually crush minority representation in Congress.
According to two voting rights groups, Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund, a ruling gutting the race provision would let the GOP nationwide redraw up to 19 House seats to favor the party.
It could also prevent Black voters from challenging political maps they believe don’t accurately represent them.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais.
Arguments lasted for more than two hours in an unusually lengthy, complicated debate.
It stems from a complex congressional redrawing dispute starting in 2022.
Louisiana’s GOP-led legislature drew a map that only had one Black majority district and five mostly white districts, despite Louisiana’s population being one-third Black. So, a group of Black voters sued.
A federal judge struck the map down and ordered a redraw. Instead of letting the judge redraw it, Louisiana Republicans passed the current map that added a second Black majority district (but protected districts of key Republicans in the state, like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise).
Then, a group of self-described “non-African American voters” sued over that map, arguing it focused too much on race and violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Like this group, critics of the Voting Rights Act often argue that intentionally considering race while drawing political maps doesn’t align with every American being treated equally. Think of it as similar to the argument people make when they say colleges shouldn’t consider race in admissions.
They essentially turned the Black voters’ argument completely on its head, and both sides ended up arguing they’re being racially discriminated against or not being treated equally.
The legal entanglement ended up at the Supreme Court in March, but justices punted on it on the last day of the session after telling sides to parse whether it’s a 14th Amendment (equal protection) issue or a 15th Amendment (racial gerrymandering) issue.
Lines of questioning from the conservative-leaning justices in arguments on Wednesday suggest the court will prohibit lawmakers from using race as a factor when drawing maps, which civil rights groups have been warning will have an immediate, significant impact on the voting process.
The right-leaning justices mostly focused on whether there should be a time limit on race being used as a factor, which is similar to other race-based policies stemming from civil rights era protections, trying to undo generations of Black voter suppression.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a key swing vote in this case, particularly focused on timing.
“This court’s cases, in a variety of contexts, have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time — sometimes for a long period of time, decades, in some cases — but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” he said.
Meanwhile, liberal-leaning justices like Justice Elena Kagan pointed out redrawing districts only happens if a court finds “a specific identified, proved violation of law.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor stressed race has long been used lawfully in the redistricting process, and pushed back on conservative justices’ argument that it can’t be used as a remedy if states violate the Voting Rights Act.
“Race is always a part of these decisions, and my colleagues are trying to tease it out in this intellectual way that doesn’t deal with the fact that race is used to help people,” she said. “Legislators might try to keep an ethnic community in one district. They might consider it to get a sense of which district to draw an incumbent into. They might review it to predict what kind of issues a district voter might be particularly interested in.”
GOP-led state legislatures are already on a crusade to expand the Republican majority in the House, at the direction of President Donald Trump, even though redrawing typically only happens when the census is conducted every 10 years. The mid-decade shuffle is possible thanks to the Supreme Court, which twice essentially punted on the issue.
However, Democratic-led state legislatures are just as ready to fight fire with fire.
Both sides of the aisle have long gerrymandered to their advantage. Some states have installed independent redistricting commissions to avoid the politics of it, like California, but now the Democratic-led states are trying to override those safeguards to keep up with GOP-controlled states.
Texas was able to deliver a map Republicans hope will flip five Democratic-controlled House seats. California is working on counteracting that by targeting five red seats.
Missouri eliminated a likely blue seat through drawing new lines, though that map faces legal challenges.
Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina, Utah, Illinois and New York are also either actively wading or considering wading into the redistricting battle, though not all are likely to be able to muscle new maps through due to either state-level constitutional amendments, the independent commissions or legal hurdles.
The report from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund warns a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the “non-African American voters” in Louisiana could eliminate Democratic seats in Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi, and shrink Democratic delegations in Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Florida.
On top of that, Congress would be less diverse, with fewer members in the Congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses.
A ruling for the high court is expected at the end of June.
Louisiana officials are pushing for a quick decision, though, to allow redrawing ahead of the 2026 midterms, arguing they just want clarity.
“We’ve been mired in litigation over our congressional maps, not just during this decade, but since the 1990s,” said Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill. “So we think the court needs to clarify its own rulings and make some sense of them, and what we heard today is that that’s really hard even for them.”
Recent precedent doesn’t exactly paint a clear picture of which way the court may lean.
In 2023, justices rejected a challenge to Section 2 in a case related to Alabama’s congressional districts. In 2024, they upheld a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court had declared “illegal racial gerrymandering.”
Civil rights activists say a ruling in favor of the Black voters in Louisiana would be a win not just for them, but for the electoral process.
“That win is a win for democracy. It is a win for all Americans,” said Janai Nelson, the president of the Legal Defense Fund. “That is why we fight because we believe in the future of this country and we believe that Black people have a right to be part of it and to self-determine who will represent them and to be part of the future of this country.”
