Louisiana is asking the Supreme Court to gut the central provision of the Voting Rights Act and ban any use of race in redistricting.
In a legal brief filed Wednesday, the state urged the court to overturn a landmark 1986 ruling that established a legal test for when a voting map illegally dilutes minorities’ voter power. That ruling, Thornburg v. Gingles, has been understood for decades to require that states with significant communities of minority voters draw districts that fairly reflect their voting power.
“Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, and other state attorneys wrote.
“For decades and in dozens of cases, the States and this Court have tried to make Gingles workable, coherent, predictable, and constitutional,” Louisiana wrote. “Louisiana’s experience suggests that Gingles cannot be reformed and should be overruled.”
Louisiana also told the Supreme Court it has made the unusual decision not to defend the state’s current congressional map. That map contains two majority-Black districts among the state’s six House seats. The state said it had adopted that map only after being “coerced” by federal courts supervising the state’s compliance with the Voting Rights Act.
The key provision of the act, Section 2, broadly prohibits discriminatory election practices based on race, color, or language minority status. In redistricting, Section 2 has resulted in the drawing of “majority-minority districts,” which are meant to give Black, Latino or Asian voters a meaningful ability to elect candidates of their choosing.
That practice is intended as a corrective for racial gerrymandering, in which state governments intentionally drew political districts to disenfranchise voters from racial and ethnic minorities, especially Black voters in the South.
Louisiana argues that such “race-based redistricting” is unconstitutional because it “violates fundamental equal protection principles.”
The Louisiana case will be argued at the Supreme Court on Oct. 15, with a decision likely to come by June 2026.
Louisiana’s arguments heavily lean on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 decision in which the conservative majority struck down race-conscious admissions and effectively ended race-based affirmative action in higher education.
“The invidious classifications underlying race-based redistricting present the last significant battle in defense of our ‘color blind’ Constitution,” Louisiana wrote.
“But this battle is easy. For ‘[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,’” the state continued, quoting SFFA. “That means no quarter for race-based redistricting.”
Black voters make up roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, but the state’s initial congressional map following the 2020 census had only one majority-Black district out of its six seats.
A federal court determined that Louisiana likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters, ordering a second majority-Black seat be drawn. The state’s GOP-dominated legislature initially complied, and a group of self-identified non-Black voters sued, alleging that the new map discriminated against them on the basis of race, and a lower court agreed.
The Supreme Court initially heard arguments on that case in March, and Louisiana defended its map then. But earlier this summer, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of announcing it will rehear the case.
In a short order issued earlier this month, the justices called for parties to be prepared to argue whether the “intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
In the last decade-and-a-half, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has generally been hostile to the Voting Rights Act. Various rulings have chipped away at both the VRA broadly and Section 2, particularly after the high court rendered the other major pillar of the law moot in 2013.
It is not immediately clear who will defend Louisiana’s map at the high court during the re-argument set for Oct. 15. A group of Black voters — represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU and other attorneys — participated in earlier arguments, including an LDF attorney in the Supreme Court’s arguments on the case earlier this year.
The LDF-led briefing, also filed on Wednesday, defended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and urged the court to not throw out the map.
“There can be no doubt that racial discrimination persists in Louisiana,” they wrote. “And Appellees have presented no basis to conclude that in January 2024, the State had suddenly cast off its history of discrimination and rendered [Section 2] protections obsolete.”