The Supreme Court Strikes Down Louisiana’s Race-Based Gerrymandering

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By a 6-3 vote, split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court ruled on April 29^th that Louisiana’s new congressional map, which added a second black-majority district, constituted an unconstitutional racial gerry­mander.

The Louisiana v. Callais case arose out of a change that Louisiana made to its originally drawn 2022 map following the 2020 census, which had contained one black-majority congressional district out of six districts in the state. In response to a lower court’s ruling that this map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the state legislature redrew its map in 2024 to add a second black-majority district.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create this additional black-majority district in today’s electoral environment. In fact, by using race as the primary consideration in adding another black-majority district, Louisiana’s legislature engaged in the sort of discriminatory race-based activity that runs counter to the Voting Rights Act’s original constitutional purpose. Accordingly, the Court struck down the revised race-based Louisiana map with the second black majority district because it was racially discriminatory in violation of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause.

The Democrats are apoplectic because this Supreme Court decision cuts off their ability to manipulate race-based redistricting to aggrandize their political power.

Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the majority opinion, did not disparage the Voting Rights Act itself. Quite the opposite. He praised its goal to remedy “nearly a century of entrenched racial discrimination in voting, an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.”

The question, however, is what primary remedy to use to undo this “insidious and pervasive evil” and for how long?

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits imposing any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure” that results “in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color…” The law is violated if citizens who fall within these protected groups “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” (Emphasis added)

The majority opinion explained that “the key concept for present purposes is ‘less opportunity than other members of the electorate to . . . elect representatives of their choice.’ This language sets a baseline against which to assess the opportunity of minority voters: the ‘opportunity’ that ‘other members of the electorate’ have ‘to elect’ their preferred candidates.”

The word “opportunity,” as used in Section 2, “must mean a chance to achieve a desired result, because the Voting Rights Act does not guarantee equal outcomes,” Justice Alito wrote. “Accordingly, ‘less opportunity’ must mean a lesser chance.”

When the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, and for several decades thereafter, intentional discrimination against black voters in how districts were drawn was prevalent in parts of the country, especially the South. A key tool used to ensure compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by undoing the invidious effects of this state-sanctioned discrimination was to require intentional race-based redistricting to balance the scales. This tool proved to be successful in giving black voters no less an opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and elect their preferred representatives, as Section 2 requires.

But as the majority decision in the Louisiana case emphasized, time does not stand still. Justice Alito noted that the Voting Rights Act led to “great strides” in advancing black voters’ opportunity for full participation in the electoral process.

“By 2004, the racial gap in voter registration and turnout had largely disappeared, with minorities registering and voting at levels that sometimes surpassed the majority,” he wrote. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

Because of these positive changes, the Supreme Court majority concluded that the Voting Rights Act does not still currently require using the same intentional race-based redistricting tool of the past to fix a problem that has been largely solved. Compliance with the Voting Rights Act no longer “provides a compelling reason that may justify the inten­tional use of race in drawing legislative districts.”

In other words, what was once necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act has outlived its useful life, meaning that Louisiana’s intentional “use of race-based redistricting” under the current circumstances turned into the reverse of this tool’s original remedial purpose. It now constitutes an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

Justice Alito made it clear in his opinion that the Court’s decision is not “gutting” the 1965 Voting Rights Act, as Justice Elena Kagan charged in her dissenting opinion. The Court was simply updating the analytical framework to be used in determining the level of proof required, under present conditions, to uphold the constitutionality of race-based redistricting that its proponents claim the Voting Rights Act still requires.

“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. This is precisely what happened in Louisiana.

“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,” the majority opinion sated. “Compliance with §2 thus could not justify the State’s use of race-based redistricting here.”

Reinforcing this conclusion is a proviso that Congress added in its 1982 amendment to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act: “That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.”

The Court applied a “strict scrutiny” standard to test the constitutionality of Louisiana’s revised district map. The “strict scrutiny” standard requires a determination as to whether this new congressional district map, which added the second majority-black district with a racial goal in mind, could pass constitutional muster today under the Equal Protection Clause.

The government must have “a compelling interest that justified its use of race” in enforcing Section 2. Redistricting based on race to fix a violation of Section 2 caused by the original districting is only justified as necessary when “the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

A state legislature may use “partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting,” which alone is not reviewable in federal court. But the record in this case pointed to race as the Louisiana legislature’s “predominant consideration” in adding the second black-majority district. Since this racial gerrymandering was not necessary to remain in compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act under present conditions, the Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, that the majority decision marks the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition” of the Voting Rights Act. “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.”

Justice Kagan and her fellow liberal justices are frozen in time, although they are perfectly willing to disrespect Supreme Court precedents directly on point with which they do not agree. “Respect for precedent cannot be a one-way street,” Justice Alito wrote.

In their frenzy, Democrat politicians rushed to denounce the Supreme Court decision.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that “the Supreme Court took another step towards resurrecting the Jim Crow South.” He lamented that its decision is “a knife to the heart of some of our most important civil rights legislation that past generations marched for, organized for, and bled for. It will bring back the old, sinister practices long discarded to the dustbin of history: state legislatures diluting, erasing, and overpowering voters of color.”

With a flourish designed to please the far-Left base of his party he needs to cultivate to have a chance of being reelected, Senator Schumer proclaimed: “Shame on the high court.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that “The corrupt conservative majority on the Supreme Court appointed by Donald Trump has taken a blowtorch to the Voting Rights Act.” He condemned the Supreme Court’s conservative majority as “illegitimate.”

Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Yvette Clark said, “Not since Jim Crow have we seen this level of systematic disenfranchisement of black voters. With the stroke of a pen, this rogue, unaccountable Court has effectively signed the death certificate of the Voting Rights Act, undoing decades of black progress.”

Resurrecting the Jim Crow South? A blowtorch to the Voting Rights Act? Disenfranchisement of black voters? A death certificate of the Voting Rights Act? All this demagoguery shows just how far the party with a legacy of protecting slavery and of Jim Crow laws is willing to go to exploit racial division in its quest for total political power.

The Supreme Court made the right decision by rejecting Louisiana’s racial gerrymandering as unconstitutional in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.