‘Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 … was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it,’ wrote Justice Alito.
The U.S. Supreme Court released a bombshell ruling on Wednesday significantly curtailing states’ use of race in the redistricting process.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 … was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority (6-3).
Known as Louisiana v. Callais, the case centers around Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-black district in its most recent congressional map. The Pelican State added the second majority-minority district following a lower court order that said its original map — which only included one majority-black district — likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
The new map prompted a new lawsuit from a different set of plaintiffs, who alleged the creation of a second majority-minority district constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A different lower court agreed with these plaintiffs.
Writing for the majority, Alito said that the debacle presents a good vehicle for the justices to tackle “the long-unresolved question [of] whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act provides a compelling reason that may justify the intentional use of race in drawing legislative districts.” After examining the facts of the case and what the Constitution requires, he noted that the majority determined that, “Correctly understood, §2 does not impose liability at odds with the Constitution, and it should not have imposed liability on Louisiana for its 2022 map.”
“Compliance with §2 thus could not justify the State’s use of race-based redistricting here. The State’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and we therefore affirm the decision below,” Alito wrote.
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas authored a separate concurring opinion, which Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch joined. In noting his full agreement with the majority opinion, the Bush 41 appointee wrote that he “would go further and hold that §2 of the Voting Rights Act does not regulate districting at all.”
“The relevant text prohibits States from imposing or applying a ‘voting qualification,’ ‘prerequisite to voting,’ or ‘standard, practice, or procedure,’ in a manner that results in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race … How States draw district lines does not fall within any of those three categories,” Thomas wrote. “The words in §2 instead ‘reach only “enactments that regulate citizens’ access to the ballot or the processes for counting a ballot;” they “do not include a State’s . . . choice of one districting scheme over another.”‘ … Therefore, no §2 challenge to districting should ever succeed.”
Associate Justice Elena Kagan authored the court’s dissenting opinion, which Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. The three Democrat appointees contended that, “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”
“I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent,” Kagan wrote.
More at:
| Law
U.S. Supreme Court Voids Race-Based Redistricting Map in Louisiana
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a race-based redistricting map in Louisiana, ruling that the state’s second black-majority district violates the Constitution.
The conservative majority ruled 6-3 that the map “is an unconstitutional gerrymander,” but stopped short of scrapping Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” Justice Alito wrote for the majority.
“This tension between §2 and the Constitution came to a head when Louisiana redrew its congressional districts after the 2020 census. In 2022, a federal judge in the Middle District of Louisiana held that the map adopted by the state legislature likely violated §2 because it did not include an additional majority-black district,” he continued. “But when the State drew a new map that contained such a district, its new map was challenged as a racial gerrymander. A three-judge court in the Western District of Louisiana held that the new map violated the Equal Protection Clause, and the State appealed to this Court.”
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Louisiana v. Callais on October 15. The court heard arguments in the last term in June but agreed to hear another round and ultimately considered whether race or politics was the state’s motivation and whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act justifies the intentional use of race in drawing legislative districts.
“For over 30 years, we have assumed for the sake of argument that the answer is yes. And we have gone further and assumed that it is enough if a State ‘ha[s] a strong basis in evidence’ for thinking that the Voting Rights Act requires race-based conduct,” Alito wrote. “But allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. These and other problems convinced us that the time had come to resolve whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting.”
“We now answer that question: Compliance with §2, as properly construed, can provide such a reason. Correctly understood, §2 does not impose liability at odds with the Constitution, and it should not have imposed liability on Louisiana for its 2022 map” he wrote. “Compliance with §2 thus could not justify the State’s use of race-based redistricting here. The State’s attempt to satisfy the Middle District’s ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and we therefore affirm the decision below.”
Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissent for the three liberal-leaning justices, calling the consequences of the decision “likely to be far-reaching and grave.”
“Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” Kagan wrote.
The case could massively impact midterm elections and the 2028 elections. Analyses by the New York Times and a left-wing group called Fair Fight Action found that between 12 and 19 Democratic congressional districts could be redrawn into GOP ones.
The case is Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24–109 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
More at:
BREAKING: Supreme Court Drops HUGE Ruling on the Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court just handed down one of the most consequential redistricting decisions in a generation — and Democrats are not going to like it one bit.
In a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the majority held that Louisiana’s congressional map — redrawn to include a second majority-black district — constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fifteenth Amendment. The Court stopped short of striking down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act entirely, but it dramatically narrowed the ways in which states may use race when drawing congressional maps.
For Republicans eyeing the House in 2026, this is the kind of ruling that changes the math.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you which justices dissented.
The ruling’s immediate implications are huge. As we’ve previously reported, Republicans could potentially pick up anywhere from 12 to 19 new House seats across the South, as states seize the opportunity to redraw maps that were previously constrained by Section 2 requirements.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) had previously announced a special legislative session to redistrict his state ahead of the ruling, a sign that Republican-led states were loading the chamber before the gun went off. Now the starting pistol has fired, and others will likely follow.
ICYMI: Guess Who This Democrat Blames for the Latest Trump Assassination Attempt.
Democrats have spent years leaning on majority-minority districts as a structural advantage — a way to pack reliably Democratic voters into safe seats under the cover of civil rights law, unconstitutionally expanding their majority in Congress.
The Court just called that strategy what it always was: using race as the predominant factor in drawing political boundaries, which the Constitution does not allow. Opponents of the Louisiana map argued in their filings that non-black voters challenging it had every right to equal protection claims when race was the driving force behind district lines.
A majority of justices agreed.
The Court’s decision preserves the existing national standard for redistricting disputes on paper, meaning it won’t immediately invalidate maps in every state — but it signals clearly to lower courts how future challenges should be decided. States across the South that have been waiting for exactly this kind of green light now have it.
The Left will scream that this is voter suppression. What it actually is is the Constitution working as written. You don’t get to draw district lines based on skin color and call it justice — and a 6-3 Supreme Court just made that abundantly clear, right on time for the 2026 midterms.
More at:
| Politics
SCOTUS just struck another blow to the Voting Rights Act. What it means for California
The Supreme Court severely restricted a federal law Wednesday that had allowed states to design voting districts that would favor candidates from racial minorities, another step in the court’s dismantling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The ruling’s impact on California, however, is uncertain.
The 6-3 ruling, in a case from Louisiana, said crafting districts in order to protect past victims of discrimination was itself an unconstitutional act of racial discrimination, as argued by Republicans who challenged the law.
Allowing states or courts to design voting districts in order to protect racial minorities, “forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.
“The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race,” Alito said, and designing districts to increase the political power of minorities is a discriminatory act. He said the Voting Rights Act must be interpreted to prohibit only redistricting that was intended to weaken racial minorities.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the decision. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the court had effectively nullified the law by allowing states to eliminate majority-minority districts as long as they could say they did it for political rather than racial reasons.
That is “nearly impossible” to prove, Kagan wrote. “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.” The ruling, she concluded, was “the latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
She was joined by the court’s other Democratic appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Politically, the ruling appears to improve Republicans’ chances to add to their congressional majorities in this year’s elections.
Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor and voting-rights expert, said Alito’s majority opinion was “the product of his long mission: to favor the white Republicans he seems to think he represents on the Supreme Court, rather than all Americans.”
But that may not be the case in California, where minority populations are not concentrated in hotly contested congressional districts and might not be greatly affected by Wednesday’s decision.
In California, Hasen said, “Dems could have an advantage if reliable Democratic voters from minority communities are spread out more.”
Still, said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the ruling “threatens the fundamental promise at the heart of our democracy: that every voter deserves an equal voice in electing their government.”
And Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a post on X, said the court’s majority “continues to gut the Voting Rights Act and vital protections for our democracy and fair representation. … California will not sit back, we will continue to uphold what makes us American, and take action — over and over again — to safeguard our democracy for the generations to come.”
But Chris Keiser, a Sacramento attorney with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, said the ruling clarifies and actually strengthens voting rights.
“Voting is an individual right and is not a proportional group right,” Keiser told the Chronicle. “Regardless of the political outcome, states should not be forced to draw racially conscious districts” and can no longer do so after Wednesday’s decision, he said.
Abigail Jackson, spokesperson for President Donald Trump, said the ruling was “a complete and total victory for American voters. The color of one’s skin should not dictate which congressional district you belong in. We commend the court for putting an end to the unconstitutional abuse of the Voting Rights Act and protecting civil rights.”
The ruling appeared to be consistent with Trump’s disparagement of “DEI” or diversity, equity and inclusion policies by states and their universities designed to benefit racial minorities. In a January 2025 executive order, Trump said he would terminate “radical and wasteful government DEI programs” that discriminate against non-minorities.
The Voting Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to prohibit racial discrimination by states in elections.
That law remained intact until 2013, when a 5-4 majority led by Roberts halted enforcement of one provision of the law: Section 5, which required states and local governments with a history of racial discrimination in elections to obtain approval from the federal government before making any changes in their voting laws.
That ruling applied mainly to nine Southern states, but also affects at least three California counties: Monterey, Yuba and Kings. Federal officials cited those counties’ use of English-only ballots in the 1970s despite having substantial Spanish-speaking populations.
The 2013 decision meant that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision the court addressed Wednesday, was “the onlyeffective VRA remedy left to challenge racial discrimination in voting,” said Marjorie Cohn, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, a strong supporter of civil rights. She cited Roberts’ assurance to the nation, in his 2013 ruling, “that Section 2 would still be available to protect voting rights.”
The latest ruling severely restricted enforcement of a more central provision of the 1965 law, Section 2, which prohibits election policies and practices that discriminate based on a voter’s race, ethnicity or use of a foreign language, and allows voters to sue state or local governments over those practices.
The court’s conclusion — that a law intended to enhance the voting power of minorities was racially discriminatory — was similar to its reasoning in a 2023 ruling on affirmative action in college admissions.
In that case, the same six-member majority, led by Roberts, said policies designed to promote enrollment of non-white minorities in colleges were unconstitutional acts of discrimination against whites and Asian Americans. California voters had outlawed affirmative action for public colleges in 1996, but the court’s ruling extended the ban to private schools such as Stanford and the University of Southern California.
In California, where 27 of the 52 U.S. House districts are represented by racial or ethnic minorities — 15 of them Latino — and more than half of all state legislators are minorities, Republicans hope to use the court’s ruling to boost their ranks.
State Democratic leaders violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws “by using race as a predominant factor in drawing the boundaries of 16 congressional districts,” Michael Columbo, a lawyer for the California Republican Party, argued in a November federal court filing. The filing was part of Republicans’ challenge to Proposition 50, the ballot measure backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that redesigned California’s congressional districts to add five majority-Democratic seats.
He acknowledged that the current districts would remain in place this year, as the court has generally refused to change a state’s election policies in the final months before a scheduled election. But Columbo said he would challenge California’s map for the 2028 and 2030 elections, the last years in which new congressional districts approved under Proposition 50 last November will be in effect.
The Supreme Court upheld the Prop 50 districts on Feb. 4, with no apparent dissenting votes. And in a December ruling rejecting a similar suit by Democrats against new House districts drawn by Republicans in Texas, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — perhaps the court’s three most conservative members — said in a concurring opinion that “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple,” and not racial discrimination.
In other words, even an outright prohibition on drafting districts to improve the chances of minority candidates might not affect the Prop 50 maps, which are due to remain in place during the 2028 and 2030 elections. Redistricting will then be returned to a bipartisan commission established by the state’s voters in 2010.
But Columbo said he would challenge California’s 2028 and 2030 election maps as racially drawn, based on Wednesday’s ruling.
Still, even if the ruling requires California to reduce the number of House districts populated mostly by minority voters, some election-law experts say it would not necessarily help the Republicans who sought the remapping.
“It depends on which whites (Republicans or Democrats) replace the minorities in the districts that are currently minority opportunity districts,” Nate Persily, a professor of constitutional and election law at Stanford University, said in an email.
More at:
More Stories
How the United Arab Emirates’ shocking OPEC exit could drive down gas prices
Melania Trump breaks silence on ‘coward’ Jimmy Kimmel’s ‘hateful and violent’ skit and calls on ABC to FIRE him
The Chief Justice and His Wife Took $20 Million From Firms He Rules On. I’m Filing for His Disbarment Today