Supreme Court Rules On Key District Case With Ripple Effects Nationwide

The Supreme Court delivered a major 6-3 ruling Wednesday, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais after the state added a second majority-Black district.

The Court said that move wasn’t required under the Voting Rights Act, so using race to draw it made the map unconstitutional. The decision doesn’t eliminate Section 2 but could impact redistricting fights nationwide.

The Court is signaling that states can’t lean on race unless the law clearly demands it. That’s likely to make it harder to push similar redraws in other states and could shift how future maps are drawn heading into upcoming elections.

In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito explained that “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 […] was designed to enforce the Constitution— not collide with it.”

However, he rebuked how lower courts used the “Court’s precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”

In her dissent, liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave” and referred to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as a “dead letter” after the ruling.

“After today, those districts exist only on sufferance, and probably not for long. If other States follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. And minority representation in government institutions will sharply decline,” she wrote.

Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) said prior to the ruling that he would call a special session of the Mississippi Legislature to redraw maps in the state three weeks after the court’s decision in the case. Mississippi’s Second Congressional District is a deep blue majority-minority district.

“It is a decision that could (and in my view should) forever change the way we draw electoral maps,” he posted to X last week. “It is my belief and federal law requires that the Mississippi Legislature be given the first opportunity to draw these maps. And the fact is, they haven’t had a fair opportunity to do that because of the pending Callais decision.”

“It is my sincere hope that, in deciding Callais, the U.S. Supreme Court will reaffirm the animating principle that all Americans are created equal and that when the government classifies its citizens on the basis of race, even as a perceived remedy to right a wrong, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that Americans of a particular race, because of their race, think alike and share the same interests and preferences – a concept that is odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” Reeves continued.