Supreme Court takes up GOP-led challenge to Voting Rights Act that could affect control of Congress

The Supreme Court is considering a major Republican-led challenge to the Voting Rights Act, the foundational legislation of the civil rights movement, which could strike down a key provision of the law prohibiting racial discrimination in redistricting.

On Wednesday, the justices will hear arguments for the second time in a case involving Louisiana’s congressional map, which includes two majority-Black districts. The state ruling could open the door for legislatures to redraw congressional maps across the South, which could boost Republicans’ electoral prospects by eliminating majority Black and Latino seats that tend to favor Democrats.

The mid-decade battle over congressional redistricting is already playing out across the country, after President Donald Trump began urging Texas and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines to make it easier for the GOP to gain its narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The court’s conservative majority has been skeptical of race considerations, most recently ending affirmative action in college admissions. Twelve years ago, the court used a sledgehammer on another pillar of a landmark voting law that requires states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain advance approval from the Justice Department or federal judges before making election-related changes.

The court separately gave state legislatures broad latitude to gerrymander electoral districts for political purposes, subject only to review by state higher courts. If the Court now weakens or strikes down Section 2 of the law, states would no longer be bound by any limits in how they draw electoral districts, an outcome that would be expected to lead to severe gerrymandering by whichever party holds power at the state level.

Just two years ago, the court, by a 5-4 vote, affirmed a ruling that found a potential violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over Alabama’s congressional map. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal colleagues in the outcome.

This decision created new districts in both states that sent two more black Democrats to Congress.

But the court now asked the parties to answer a fundamental question: “Whether the state’s intentional creation of a majority-minority second congressional district constitutes a violation of the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

In the first arguments in the Louisiana case in March, Roberts appeared skeptical of the majority black 2nd District, which last year elected Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields. Roberts described the region as a “snake” extending more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) to connect parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas.

The legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional districts lasted three years.

The state’s Republican-dominated Legislature drew a new congressional map in 2022 to account for population shifts reflected in the 2020 census. But the changes effectively maintained the status quo in five majority-white, Republican-leaning districts and one majority-black, Democratic-leaning district.

Civil rights advocates won a lower court ruling that counties likely discriminated against black voters.

The state ultimately drew a new map to comply with the court ruling and protect influential Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. But white voters in Louisiana claimed in their separate lawsuit that race was the dominant factor driving it. A three-judge court agreed, bringing the current case to the Supreme Court.