Oregon — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Tuesday that Louisiana’s congressional map, which deliberately created a second majority-Black district to comply with a lower-court interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Equal Protection Clause.
In an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, properly construed, does not require states to draw districts predominantly on the basis of race. Because the Robinson plaintiffs failed to meet the updated Gingles preconditions (including race-neutral illustrative maps that satisfy all legitimate state criteria and proof of racially polarized voting disentangled from partisanship), no compelling interest justified Louisiana’s use of race in SB8. The decision affirms a Western District of Louisiana three-judge panel and remands for further proceedings.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it,” Alito wrote. The majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, emphasized that the Constitution “almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race” and that compliance with the Voting Rights Act cannot justify race-predominant districting absent a strong inference of intentional discrimination.
The ruling updates the 40-year-old Thornburg v. Gingles framework to reflect modern realities: a two-party system where race and party preference frequently correlate, the non-justiciability of partisan gerrymandering claims, and sophisticated mapping tools that make race-neutral alternatives straightforward to evaluate. Plaintiffs must now show that minority voters have “less opportunity than other members of the electorate” under neutral districting criteria — not that the state failed to maximize majority-minority districts.
Oregon’s senior U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley sharply criticized the decision, calling it a gutting of the Voting Rights Act. In statements posted to X (formerly Twitter), Merkley said: “The Supreme Court just gutted the Voting Rights Act. States can now splinter minority communities into multiple Congressional Districts to eliminate their impact on elections. It’s free rein to discriminate against communities of color.” He added that the Court “dealt a serious blow to one of the bedrock laws that protects our fundamental freedom to vote today, a freedom that Justice Kagan reminds us was hard won in her dissent.”
The Court’s opinion stands in direct contrast to Merkley’s characterization. Far from eliminating protections against intentional vote dilution, the majority held that Section 2 remains enforceable when it aligns with the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on purposeful racial discrimination. The decision explicitly preserves liability where evidence supports a “strong inference” that a state intentionally drew maps to deny minority voters equal opportunity because of race. What it rejects is the view that Section 2 compels race-based line-drawing whenever a majority-minority district is mathematically possible, a reading the Court said would collide with the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, arguing the majority’s reinterpretation of Gingles would make vote-dilution claims far harder to prove. The majority countered that decades of precedent had sometimes forced states into the very racial classifications the Constitution forbids, particularly as advanced software allows easy creation of maps that achieve all traditional and political goals without racial predominance.
For Louisiana, the practical result is clear: the state must redraw its six congressional districts without the race-predominant District 6 that connected distant Black population centers to reach a 50%+ Black voting-age population. Nationally, the ruling reinforces states’ authority to prioritize traditional districting principles, compactness, contiguity, respect for political subdivisions, and partisan considerations, over judicially mandated racial balancing. In an era of precise computer mapping and closely divided electorates, the decision underscores that the Voting Rights Act remains a targeted tool against intentional discrimination, not a vehicle for proportional representation by race.
The case is Louisiana v. Callais, Nos. 24-109 and 24-110. The full opinion is available on the Supreme Court’s website.
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