SCOTUS rules on key Voting Rights Act rule ahead of midterm elections
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • 6 months ago • 32 commentsBy: Breanne Deppisch (Fox News)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the scope of a key Voting Rights Act provision that restricts how states draw districts affecting minority voters, constraining states' use of race as a factor when drawing congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Justices for the 6-3 majority ruled that Louisiana's newly redrawn congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district, constituted an "illegal" racial gerrymander.
Though the justices acknowledged that compliance with the Voting Rights Act can be a compelling interest for states, they ruled that it did not require Louisiana to create the new map with a second, majority Black district.
Compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, "as properly construed, can provide such a reason," Justice Samuel Alito said, writing for the majority. "Correctly understood, Section 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 Section 2 thus could not justify the State's use of race-based redistricting here," he added.
Louisiana voters and civil rights advocates call on the Supreme Court to uphold a congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais on March 24, 2025 in Washington, D.C.(Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Legal Defense Fund)
While the ruling does not overturn the Voting Rights Act or Section 2, it is likely to narrow how minority representation influences multiple states' congressional maps, and trigger a new wave of legal challenges over congressional boundaries.
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, was first argued last March before the Supreme Court, and centered on whether Louisiana's 2024 congressional map, which had added a second majority-Black district, amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The dispute reached the high court after months of legal back-and-forth, including oral arguments last March, and a rare second round of arguments last October, focused on whether Louisiana's map (and creation of the second majority-Black district under the VRA) violated the 14th or 15th Amendments of the Constitution.
Conservative justices appeared skeptical during October's arguments about keeping Section 2 of the VRA in place, as is, and pressed the lawyer for the NAACP on whether she believed there should be a time duration limit on the intentional use of race in drawing voting districts under the law.
During those arguments, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other conservatives on the high court appeared open to the idea that Congress, in passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act law, may have intended a sort of "sunset period" for Section 2, allowing it to weaken over time.
That possibility was invoked by Kavanaugh several times during oral arguments, as he pressed lawyers for the state of Louisiana and the NAACP for more specifics.
Hashim Mooppan, the principal deputy solicitor general, told the court the congressional map in Louisiana that was drafted in response to Section 2 of the VRA could also be construed as a "reverse partisan gerrymander," and one that is also based on "purely racial" considerations.
Meanwhile, NAACP lawyer Janai Nelson, arguing the case on behalf of Black voters, told the high court that siding with Louisiana's request to reverse the map would be a "staggering reversal of precedent," which she said "would throw maps across the country into chaos."
Advocates call for a fair and representative congressional map in Louisiana v. Callais at the Supreme Court on March 24, 2025, in Washington, D.C.(Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Legal Defense Fund)
A ruling from the high court has long been expected to have major implications for future elections.
Critics have warned in recent months that weakening VRA could further erode protections for minority voters under the Voting Rights Act, at a time when several Republican-led states have attempted to aggressively push through new congressional maps ahead of the midterms.
They argued in filings to the Supreme Court that non-Black voters failed to show the direct harm required for equal protection claims or prove race was the main factor in redrawing the map.
But lawyers arguing the case on behalf of the NAACP and Black voters in the state have warned that a ruling in favor of Louisiana could have a staggering impact on races in 2026 and beyond.
A recent report from the nonprofit groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund estimates that an overhaul of the VRA could swing an estimated 12 Democratic-held House districts in favor of Republican candidates.
This is a breaking news story. Check back shortly for updates.
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It was never meant to be permanent. It was meant to defeat southern resistance.
It was always unconstitutional.
We have returned to the idea of being colorblind.
Reducing progressives’ systematic racism bit by bit. Another win for the non racists,
Except it's the exact opposite. Conservatives have been wanting to shred the voting rights act ever since it stopped them from openly discriminating against black Americans 60 years ago. Now the Dixiepublicans have surged back into prominence just in time to embarrass the shit out the rest of us who thought we'd moved on from conservatives tired racist bullshit. Not that any of the rightwing bigots will admit why they're doing what they're doing, they'll just stare the rest of us in the face and repeat "Nuh uh, you're the racist, nuh uh, you're the racist, nuh uh, you're the racist". Have fun while it lasts, the pendulum of reality is going to come swinging back so fast the right won't have a jaw anymore after they get swept the fuck out of the SCOTUS and the government over the next few years. It's going to be fun watching rational Americans clean house of these spineless rightwing conservative white nationalist rectum juice guzzlers.
The Bizarro world of progressivism where progressives, in true Orwellian fashion, call themselves non racist despite their entire political philosophy being raced based and premised on the government treating people differently on the basis of race, to the point where they claim black people are only represented if they have special districts where black people, because they are black, vote for a black person to represent them. Because blacks can only be represented by blacks, and if packed into a majority black district will elect only black people. It's racism stacked upon racism for progressives.
Many on the left seem to think the black population needs them to protect them. More and more blacks are beginning to realize they have been voting dem for years and things are not much better for them than they were. The only thing open to the dems is to keep calling folks on the right racists and hope they will buy it.
Dude, that is some gaslighting right there. Do you read history at all? Progressives haven’t been trying to assist black people because they are racist. That is insane. The progressive efforts at justice for black people are a response to generations of racist conservatives trying to prevent black people from being represented at all. You know that or you should know that.
Do you really tell yourself that life in America has always been fair and just for black people and nothing special ever needed to be done to correct it?
Do they not?
There are 257 Democrats in Congress. 62 of them are black.
There are 260 Republicans in Congress. 5 of them are black, and that happened in part because districts were drawn to help ensure that even that small bit of representation was possible.
Left to their own devices, racist conservatives in the South will now redraw districts designed to make black voters as even weaker political minorities than they already are.
How do we know this? Because they did it before and there is no reason to think they won’t get right back to it. Just look at the glee with which conservatives are receiving this decision.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's like someone took off every rightwing conservative's head and then screwed it back on backwards, their words make no sense, up means down, wrong means right, accused pedophile means divine prophet, and helping black Americans who have been discriminated against by white scum bags for centuries, is apparently 'racist'. They're completely insane.
Do you know what racism is?
Progressives haven’t been trying to assist black people because they are racist
Do black people have agency in your world? Can black people be progressives, or are they just helpless black people waiting for the paternalistic white progressive to give them things? Last I looked black progressives were fighting for race based districts..
ll yourself that life in America has always been fair and just for black people an
No. What does that have to with drawing congressional districts based on race in 2026?
Who cares? White progressives in the south are a "political minority" so are white conservatives in the north. Do they deserve race based districts to give them representation? Do whites in majority black areas need racial gerrymanders to give them representation, since you and progressives apparently believe people can only represent their own race.
What black American has been discriminated against for centuries? That's a miracle!
Or are you just so race obsessed that you think all black people who every lived are indistinguishable from each other and have no separate identity? A black person born in 1840 has the same experience as a black voter born when Obama was President?
It's clearly not even worth the time to address all the gaping holes in such tired backwards illogic, so I'll keep it short. Yes, most people know white nationalists and white supremacists think as long as they don't talk about it, no one can prove it's happening. It's what they've always wanted, to go back to what amounts to "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in regard to racism. College acceptances? Housing? Hiring? Promotions? Gerrymandering along racial lines? As long as no one says anything about race, white supremacists can be as racist as they want to be and they will be and still are in many, mostly Republican controlled parts of the nation. To claim America is post-racist or post white supremacist is to be in complete denial of reality. But then again, that would be par for the course for Dixiepublicans.
Hilarious....
Exactly. Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. You don’t care if there might be racial injustice in America, so long as it doesn’t affect you.
Lol. "racial justice" is now redefined as giving racial groups "rights" as opposed to individuals. Jim crow with new branding.
I don't care that ethno nationalists who believe that only people of the same race can represent others of that race are mad. Blacks are individuals not the homogonous voting racial voting block that progressives treat them as.
What made African Americans into a group in the first place? Do you think 200 years of slavery and then 100 years of second class citizenship had anything to do with it? It's too late , at least for now, to try and claim everyone should be an individual . And anyway, arent MAGAs a catered to group?
Get rid of the Constitution than.
The 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution didn’t prevent racist assholes from shitting on the rights of black Americans for over a century, and many still seek to continue that practice. You seem to want to pretend none of that ever happened and we should make no effort to repair the injustice.
The answer to violating individual rights on the basis of race isn't to spend another century violating individual rights on the basis of race, just with different beneficiaries. Two wrongs don't become right because you label racist discrimination "repair."
The 14th Amendment doesn't say "equal protection for the historically oppressed group." It says equal protection for individuals. Not groups. Individual human beings. It’s not a loophole. Its telling that simply pointing out that the Constitution protects individual rights and not race based group rights garners such a reaction.
. The injustice of Jim Crow wasn't that the wrong race was being discriminated against. It was that people were discriminated against on the basis of race at all. Believing that racial discrimination in 2026 will somehow repair those injustices suffered by people long dead is ludicurious. All it does is create another generation of victims who the government discriminated against
Oh, by all means. Give us some alternatives. The problem is that over the decades, conservatives have only complained about solutions, rather than offer any of their own. But if you want to be the first to suggest a path to racial justice, that would be delightful.
No, it was not that “people were discriminated against on the basis of race.” You make it sound like generalized, random injustice in all directions. You go out of your way to avoid specificity and deflect responsibility.
The fact is that white people specifically discriminated against black people specifically. This discrimination was social, political, and economic. It was enforced under color of law. Progressives had to go to court over and over and over again to win judgments and the racists still went out of their way to discriminate.
So Congress wrote new laws to very specifically ensure racial justice. Rather than support the effort or offer superior alternatives, racist conservatives have disingenuously bitched about the constitutionality of it all. But only AFTER spending over a century giving a big fat F-You to the Constitution. So when conservatives try to tell us after a century of enthusiastic Jim Crow that they actually care about the Constitution or that they don’t see race, the rest of us throw up in our mouths a little.
Yes and even after finally winning cases like school integration southern white men would burn down their schools rather than allow their children to learn in the same building as blacks. They would continue to discriminate like Trump's NY rental properties and be fined multiple times rather rent to black people. We could fill volumes of books on the injustices of white male Americans, but today we get gaslit when we point it out.
A majority-Black district is by definition illegal discrimination against whites in that district
And a majority-White district is by definition illegal discrimination against Blacks in that district. Is that your contention, or is that just fine?
The black majority districts were specifically drawn that way with that as the only objective, ignoring all other factors.
Except for the fact that there are a lot less minority 'majority' districts than others. Also the argument to use majority approved maps now gives progressive liberals more ammunition in it's move against the Electoral College. Someday this short sited hyper-partisan bullshit is going to backfire spectacularly on the whole country.
The white majority districts, which were all of them for over 200 years of our nation's history, were drawn to give the party in power an advantage. It's been done by both parties in power since the early 1800's.
Then, when black Americans were able to vote (again after reconstructions horrid racist methods to keep them from the ballot boxes) the white conservatives in power then started to gerrymander to keep white conservatives in power, especially in the South, cutting up majority black districts so they could never have a majority of black Americans in any one district. The courts finally tried to remedy this obviously racist bullshit, but the answer wasn't "let's make districts based on geography and not skin color", it was "let's demand that a percent of districts must be black majority so that black Americans can have some representation". And now of course, the white conservatives are screaming that giving them that much is racist so they should be able to chop up black districts all they want even if it's proven in court that its FUCKING RACIST which it has been and obviously is.
So, to me the question is really "which is MORE racist?" Is it white conservatives chopping up districts with the specific intent of weakening black Americans ability to elect candidates that represent them and care about their needs? Or is it requiring a percentage of districts contain a majority of black voters so they can elect legislators that they feel represent them? They're both technically "racist" ideas, but one seems to be faaaaar more racist. You can also tell which plan is more racist by asking just about any rightwing conservative bigot, who, of course, will always choose option 1. When the party defending and supporting white nationalism and white supremacy who often fly and defend the confederate flag picks a plan, you can safely assume that's the most racist option.
Personally, I would love all district maps to be decided upon by a bi-partisan commission, but that's impossible without all States adopt the same system. Otherwise, you just have the dirty scum bag politicians on both sides rigging the game and then patting themselves on the back because lying, cheating and tipping the scales to benefit self and party over community and nation is their ideal. It's what they're striving for and their ability to maximize their partisanship is a measure of their success as a politician.
And “ladies night” discriminates against men, but nobody with any appreciation for context or history is actually threatened by it.
Ladies night is to bring in ladies for the man and to sell alcohol. Men don't complain and Ladies like prices, so it is a win win
I’m not suggesting there isn’t a good reason for it. Quite the opposite, in fact. But rulings like this show us that a “good reason” doesn’t negate that the fact that discrimination is taking place.
A promotion at a bar and voting districts are different situations. Ladies night is really bait to attract more men. .Benefits both sexes and the bar. Makes money or they wouldn't do it.
Of course they are. But they still treat people unequally based on an immutable characteristic. That’s discrimination.
To show how stupid the whole idea of race based voting districts are, just look at the results in Virginia last year.
The majority of whites voted for the black candidate. The majority of blacks voted for the white candidate.