The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections. Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, as Louisiana and the challengers had asked the court to do, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent (which was 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 was the latest, and presumably final, chapter in a long-running dispute arising from Louisiana’s efforts to adopt a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. The first map that the state adopted, in 2022, had one majority-Black district out of the six allotted to the state. A group of Black voters – who comprise roughly one-third of the state’s population – went to federal court, where they alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits discrimination in voting.
A federal judge agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that ruling. It instructed Louisiana to draw a new map by January 2024 or risk having the court adopt one for it.
The map that Louisiana drew in 2024 created a second majority-Black district, leading to the election in November of that year of Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s.
The map also prompted the lawsuit leading to Wednesday’s opinion. It was filed by a group of “non-African American” voters who contended that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by sorting voters based on race. A three-judge federal district court agreed with them and barred the state from using the 2024 map in future elections, but a divided Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling in May 2024.
The Supreme Court took up the case and heard oral arguments for the first time in March 2025. Defending the 2022 map, Louisiana contended that once the lower courts determined that the 2022 map was likely invalid and ordered it to adopt a new map with a second majority-Black district, its focus was not on race but on creating a map that would protect the state’s powerful Republican incumbents in Congress, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee.
The “non-African American” voters challenging the 2024 map told the justices that it was “utterly implausible” that both race and politics were equally responsible for the 2024 map.
In a departure from their normal practice, the justices did not issue a decision in the case before their summer recess last year. Instead, they issued a brief order setting the case for a second argument in the fall. They later instructed the litigants to file 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 bars the government from denying or restricting voting rights based on race.
By the time the justices heard the second round of oral arguments in October, the Black voters were the only litigants who continued to defend the 2024 map. Louisiana and the “non-African American” voters contended that race-based redistricting is unconstitutional, even if it is done to comply with Section 2. Although the Trump administration did not contend that the justices should strike down Section 2 altogether, it urged the justices to uphold the three-judge district court’s decision.
In a 36-page opinion, Alito explained that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” The question before the court, he said, 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 wrote, Section 2 of the VRA guarantees voters, including minority voters, an opportunity to cast a vote for their preferred candidate, but that candidate’s chances of success may be affected by the choices that the state is allowed to make when drawing a redistricting map – such as the desire to protect incumbents or increase the number of seats held by a particular political party. And under the Constitution, Alito continued, a violation of Section 2 only occurs when “the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred” – for example, when there are several possible maps that contain majority-minority districts, but the state “cannot provide a legitimate reason for rejecting all those maps.”
In this case, Alito said, Louisiana’s goal in adopting the 2024 map “was racial”: the state enacted it in the wake of the lower court’s finding that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and sought to avoid having the court impose a different map that would have created a second majority-Black district but which would also “have imperiled one of the influential incumbents the legislature sought to protect.”
The state did not have the kind of compelling interest that would have justified considering race in drawing the 2024 map, Alito wrote, because – among other things – the plaintiffs challenging the 2022 map “did not provide an illustrative map that” protected the state’s Republican incumbents, and because the lower court in that case “relied on the ‘sordid history’ of intentional discrimination by Louisianian officials in the decades before the Voting Rights Act’s passage,” even though Section 2 focuses on “‘current conditions.’” “And none of the historical evidence presented by plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination.”
“In sum,” Alito concluded, “because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8. That map is an unconstitutional gerrymander, and its use would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”
In a somber tone, Kagan read a summary of her 48-page dissent from the bench – a signal of her strong disagreement with the majority’s ruling. “The Voting Rights Act,” she wrote “is—or, now more accurately, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’” But the requirements that the court imposes on Wednesday, she contended, “will effectively insulate any practice, including any districting scheme, said by a State to have any race-neutral justification. That justification can sound in traditional districting criteria, or else can sound in politics and partisanship. As to the latter, the State need do nothing more than announce a partisan gerrymander,” she said. “Assuming the State has left behind 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’s decision, Kagan omitted the traditional “respectfully” from her conclusion, writing only, “I dissent.”