Supreme Court ruling curbs Voting Rights Act, threatens Black congressional seats

The Supreme Court opened a new front in the long retreat of federal voting protections on Tuesday, ruling 6-3 that Louisiana did not have to keep a second majority-Black congressional district and making it easier for states to dismantle maps that give Black voters a fair chance to elect candidates of choice.

At the center of Louisiana v. Callais was a district stretching from Baton Rouge through Alexandria to Shreveport along the I-49 corridor, the seat held by Democrat Cleo Fields after his return to Congress in 2024. Louisiana’s legislature adopted SB8 in 2024 after federal courts said the state’s 2022 congressional map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it failed to include an additional majority-Black district.

The court’s conservative majority said the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create that district and held that the revised map amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling does not formally erase Section 2, but it narrows the tool that civil-rights lawyers have used to challenge maps diluting Black voting power. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented and warned that the decision makes Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

The immediate political stakes are blunt. State lawmakers and Republican mapmakers now have more room to redraw majority-minority districts in the South before the next election cycle, and the Louisiana case gives them a blueprint for attacking seats built to comply with voting-rights law. That could imperil Black congressional representation in places where district lines have been drawn, or redrawn, to reflect the growth and geographic concentration of Black voters.

The Louisiana map was itself a product of earlier litigation. A federal judge had found the state’s 2022 plan likely violated Section 2, leading lawmakers to enact SB8 and create a second majority-Black district. That district delivered a second Black representative to Congress, and its loss would again reduce the number of Black voices in a delegation from a state with a long history of racially polarized voting.

Civil-rights groups said the ruling would invite further attacks on majority-Black districts. The NAACP called it a devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act, while advocates warned that lawmakers in former slave-holding states could move quickly to target districts where Black voters have been able to elect their preferred candidates. The decision lands after Shelby County v. Holder weakened the law’s preclearance system in 2013, leaving Section 2 as one of the last major federal protections against discriminatory maps and now, after Tuesday, a far weaker one.