WASHINGTON (LN) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, ruling 6-3 that the Voting Rights Act did not require the State to create the district in the first place — and substantially updating the legal test that has governed minority voting rights litigation since 1986.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court's majority, affirmed the Western District of Louisiana's holding that SB8, the State's 2024 congressional map, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the majority went far beyond the facts of Louisiana's redistricting fight, using the case to resolve a question the Court had avoided for more than 30 years: whether compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can ever justify intentional race-based redistricting.
The answer, the Court held, is yes — but only under a significantly narrowed reading of the statute that makes such justification far harder to invoke.
Alito opened the opinion by observing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it, and that lower courts had sometimes applied the Court's Section 2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.
The decision updates the framework the Court established in Thornburg v. Gingles, the 1986 ruling that set the three-precondition test plaintiffs must satisfy to prove a vote-dilution claim. The majority held that Gingles was decided at a time when the Court often paid insufficient attention to the language of statutory provisions and that the framework must now be updated to require plaintiffs to disentangle race from partisan politics at every stage of the analysis.
Under the updated framework, plaintiffs challenging a redistricting map must now produce illustrative alternative maps drawn without using race as a criterion and that satisfy all of the State's legitimate political goals — including incumbency protection and partisan targets. On the second and third Gingles preconditions, plaintiffs must show racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation. And on the totality-of-circumstances inquiry, historical discrimination and present-day disparities attributed to the effects of societal discrimination are entitled to much less weight, with the focus shifted to evidence of present-day intentional racial discrimination.
Applying that framework to Louisiana, the Court held that the Robinson plaintiffs — who had successfully argued in the Middle District that the State's 2022 map likely violated Section 2 by failing to include a second majority-Black district — had failed at every step. Their illustrative maps did not protect all the incumbents the State sought to shield, including Representative Julia Letlow, whom the maps would have placed in a district with over twice as many registered Democrats as registered Republicans. Their racial-bloc voting analysis did not control for partisan preferences. And their totality-of-circumstances evidence relied on Louisiana's pre-Voting Rights Act history of discrimination while treating the absence of recent intentional discrimination as irrelevant — an approach the majority said had its priorities backwards.
Because Section 2 did not require Louisiana to draw a second majority-Black district, the majority held, the State had no compelling interest to justify SB8's race-based configuration of District 6. The Western District court described the district as stretching some 250 miles from Shreveport in the northwest corner of the state to Baton Rouge in southeast Louisiana, connecting pockets of Black population across the state. The district was drawn that way, the Court noted, specifically to protect Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Appropriations Committee member Julia Letlow from the alternative maps the Robinson court had endorsed.
The majority also addressed the Court's 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan, which had upheld a Section 2 challenge to Alabama's congressional map. Alito wrote that Allen was about whether Alabama's novel evidentiary standard required a change to existing Section 2 precedent, and did not address the central issues resolved here — including whether race-based redistricting under Section 2 could extend indefinitely in light of changed conditions, or whether plaintiffs must disentangle race from politics — questions the Court said it now squarely resolves for the first time.
Justice Elena Kagan filed a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, arguing that the majority's reinterpretation of Section 2 substantially weakens the statute's protections and that the Fourteenth Amendment analysis was irrelevant to the case. The majority pushed back in a footnote, stating that the dissent appears to forget — or at least tries to lead readers to forget — that the decision before us is based on the Fourteenth Amendment.
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurrence joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch; both Thomas and Gorsuch also joined the majority opinion, as did Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The ruling affirms Callais v. Landry, 732 F. Supp. 3d 574, and remands for further proceedings consistent with the updated framework — leaving open how dozens of pending Section 2 cases in lower courts, many of which were held awaiting this decision, will now be resolved under a test that requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination to sustain a vote-dilution claim.