Supreme Court sides against Black voters in blow to landmark civil rights law

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on April 29 threw out a congressional map in Louisiana that had been drawn to protect the voting power of Black residents, a decision that limits a landmark civil rights law.

An ideologically divided court sided 6-3 with the Trump administration and with the non-Black voters who challenged the map as relying too heavily on race to sort voters – and it did so just three years after upholding the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s vote dilution protections for racial minorities.

The decision is a continuation of the conservative court’s “colorblind” approach to the Constitution that often views consideration of race as discriminatory.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito called the map an "unconstitutional gerrymander" that violates the constitutional rights of the non-Black voters who challenged it.

The court's three liberal justices dissented. Justice Elena Kagan said the consequences of the majority's decision "are likely to be far-reaching and grave," rendering the protections of the civil rights law "all but a dead letter."

"I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority's now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act," she wrote.

The decision could ultimately reduce the number of Black and Hispanic members of Congress and boost Republicans' chances of winning more seats in the U.S. House, where they currently have a thin majority. States now have a freer hand to rejigger boundaries of voting districts at all levels of government.

But the ruling − one of the most anticipated of the term − may not have been issued in time to make a significant difference in this year's midterm elections. A few states could try redrawing congressional maps but would likely face both practical and legal challenges.

Voting Rights Act was already weakened

Section Two of the Voting Rights Act tries to prevent legislative map drawers from diminishing the voting power of racial minorities by either packing them into one district or spreading them out across too many districts to have an impact.

Those protections became more important after the court, in 2013, struck down a different part of the act − one used to monitor states with a history of discrimination.

It will now be easier for Republicans to draw maps that favor their party, particularly in the South, where a voter’s race closely aligns with party preference.

Alito wrote that the voting rights law "requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination." It's not enough, he said, that a map "fails to provide a sufficient number of majority-minority districts."

In her dissent, Kagan wrote that intentional discrimination is very difficult to prove.

That means, she said, that under the majority’s “new view” of the law, a state can systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power “without legal consequences.”

Multiyear battle over Louisiana's map

The racially and politically charged case grew out of a yearslong battle over Louisiana’s congressional map.

After the 2020 census, the state Legislature created a map that had only one majority-Black district out of six, even though Black people make up about one-third of the state's population.

When a group of Black voters sued, lower courts said the map likely violated the Voting Rights Act, the centerpiece legislation of the civil rights movement, passed after peaceful marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers on what became known as "Bloody Sunday."

But when the GOP-controlled legislature created a second majority-Black district in 2024, a group of self-described non-Black voters went to court in a separate action, arguing a “racial quota” cost the state a Republican seat in a narrowly divided Congress.

Supreme Court expanded the case

The Supreme Court debated the issue in early 2025. Rather than issuing a decision, however, the justices took the rare step of calling for a second round of oral arguments that more squarely put the future of the redistricting protections in jeopardy. They asked whether states may create legislative districts that comply with the Voting Rights Act without violating the bans on racial discrimination in the 14th and 15th Amendments – changes to the Constitution passed after the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people.

Louisiana, which initially defended the map, argued instead in October that the Voting Rights Act’s redistricting protections are both “unworkable and unconstitutional.”

The Department of Justice under President Donald Trump likewise argued that it's become too easy for courts to invalidate maps as discriminating against Blacks without sufficiently considering whether race-neutral factors − such as incumbency protection and partisan advantage − played a role.

“The way Section 2 has been construed… is so far from the things that are likely intentionally discriminatory and, indeed, are affirmatively compelling gerrymanders that are unconstitutional,” Hashim Mooppan, a DOJ attorney, said during oral arguments.

NAACP called Voting Rights Act crucial

The attorney representing Black voters in Louisiana countered that the civil rights law has played a crucial role in diversifying leadership in the state and giving minority voters an equal opportunity to participate in the process.

The fact that Louisiana has never elected a Black statewide candidate shows the outsized role race continues to play in the state’s elections, Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said during the oral arguments.

Democratic voting rights groups had warned that Republicans could gain 19 more House seats if the court gutted vote dilution protections.

But J. Benjamin Aguinaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general, said Republicans risk turning safe districts for incumbents into competitive ones if they don’t create majority-minority districts, showing there are reasons other than the Voting Rights Act that might prompt a legislature to avoid spreading racial minorities among multiple districts.