Supreme Court Limits Voting Rights Act, Strikes Down Louisiana Congressional Map, and Signals Ongoing Skepticism of Race-Conscious State Action
In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Alito, the Supreme Court upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark statutory provision affording members of every racial group an equal “opportunity” to “elect representatives of their choice.” The Court’s opinion, however, struck down the Louisiana congressional map at issue, finding that its addition of a new majority-Black district was an unconstitutional race-based gerrymander. While the majority characterized its Opinion as “updating” Section 2, the three dissenting Justices opined that Section 2 and its voting protections for racial minorities are now “all but a dead letter.”
Louisiana’s congressional maps have been subject to litigation since it redrew them following the 2020 census. In 2022, a federal judge entered a preliminary injunction and found that Louisiana’s newly redrawn map likely violated Section 2 because only one of the state’s six congressional districts was majority-Black (even though roughly two of six Louisiana voters are Black). In an effort to comply with that order, the state redrew its map and added a second majority-Black district. A group of “non-African American” voters then filed a new lawsuit that challenged this second map as an impermissible racial gerrymander that violated the Equal Protection Clause. In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel agreed with the challengers and invalidated the second map.
The high Court resolved the case by addressing a question it said had lingered for decades: whether compliance with Section 2 may justify, under a strict scrutiny standard, race-conscious redistricting. The Court answered affirmatively, but emphasized that Section 2, “as properly construed,” only justifies race-based redistricting to remedy intentional discrimination, not merely discriminatory effects. The Court further held that Section 2 will impose liability only when the evidence supports a “strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority votes less opportunity because their race.”
Applying this framework, the Court struck down the second Louisiana map (containing the additional majority-Black district) and found that the plaintiffs’ evidence was not sufficient. First, the majority noted that in voting dilution cases, plaintiffs often present illustrative maps that include a larger number of majority-minority districts, as purported evidence that the state’s maps (with fewer majority-minority districts) discriminated against racial minorities. But such evidence, the Court held, will often prove nothing about the state’s motivations. Because states draw maps for many reasons—including political and partisan reasons, such as protecting certain incumbents—an illustrative map will be meaningful only if the plaintiffs’ proposal achieves all the aims that the state intended. The plaintiffs who challenged the original Louisiana map had failed to do so, because their proposed map did not track the state’s political and partisan goals, including incumbency protection. In other words, the difference between the illustrative map and the state’s map did not create an inference of intentional race discrimination by the state; rather, the differences could be explained by political and partisan motivations.
Second, the majority found that evidence of a low number of Black Louisianans being elected to Congress was not enough, because it failed to account for a race-neutral explanation – i.e., the political alignment of Black voters with one particular party (i.e., the Democratic Party).
Third, evidence of a “sordid history” of intentional discrimination by Louisianan officials prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act was also not sufficient. The Court explained that the focus of Section 2 must be on “current conditions,” not on “decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems.”
Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, dissented, arguing that the majority had not merely “updated” Section 2 doctrine but had effectively “eviscerated” it. Specifically, the dissent opined that the majority had converted an “effects test, as commanded by Congress, into a purpose test, as preferred by this Court.” As a practical matter, proving racially discriminatory legislative purposes will be challenging, and states will have much broader leeway in their redistricting decisions. The dissent characterized Section 2 as “all but a dead letter.”
Callais will reshape Section 2 litigation and Equal Protection challenges to redistricting decisions and will have a tangible impact on the country’s congressional maps. It also reflects a broader trend in the Supreme Court’s decisions on the law of discrimination. Much like the reasoning in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College—in which the same six Justices barred the use of race-conscious criteria in college admissions—Callais reveals the majority’s skepticism of race-conscious efforts to remediate past discrimination. So too does it show that the majority sees discriminatory intent as a defining feature of unlawful discrimination, and is skeptical of arguments based on discriminatory effects.