CNN
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The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in a years-old, messy legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional districts that could have nationwide implications for how states consider race as they draw new lines.
And given the GOP’s narrow majority, the high court’s decision could be a factor that helps decide control of the House of Representatives after the 2026 election.
The state’s briefing at the Supreme Court drips with exasperation: Louisiana was, at first, required by a federal court in 2022 to create a second majority Black district out of the state’s six total districts. A group of self-described “non-African American voters” then sued in 2024, alleging the state violated the Constitution by relying too much on race to meet the first court’s demands.
“Louisiana is tired,” state officials told the Supreme Court in December. “Midway through this decade, neither Louisiana nor its citizens know what congressional map they can call home.”
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, tees up a series of important questions that deal with race and redistricting. The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires that states do not dilute the power of minority voters, a response to decades of post-Civil War efforts – particularly in the South – to limit the political power of African Americans.
And yet the equal protection clause demands that a state cannot draw a map based on race, even if those efforts are intended to ensure compliance with federal law.
Because of that inherent tension, the Supreme Court has tended to give some “breathing room” to states in drawing their maps. The central question of the case is exactly how much room state lawmakers should have.
Louisiana officials have suggested that the Supreme Court might want to use the case to take federal courts out of the business of deciding racial gerrymanders altogether, just as it withdrew from fights over political gerrymanders in a 2019 decision. But a group of Black plaintiffs that challenged the state’s original map are, understandably, opposed to that idea because it would severely limit their ability to challenge future discriminatory maps.
“We would not be at all pleased with that outcome,” said Sarah Brannon, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, which is representing the minority plaintiffs who initially sued. “It would set a very bad precedent going forward and make it very difficult for civil rights groups, minority voters to bring claims in the future.”
The Supreme Court has, in recent years, slowly chipped away at the power of the Voting Rights Act. But in a stunning decision in 2023, the court appeared to bolster a key provision of the VRA by ordering Alabama to redraw its map to allow for an additional Black majority district. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, penned the opinion for a 5-4 majority, siding with the court’s three liberals. Another conservative, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, agreed with the key parts of the holding.
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The new district at issue in the case slashes diagonally from Shreveport in the northwest of the state to Baton Rouge in the southeast for some 250 miles to create a district where Black residents make up some 54% of voters – up from about 24% under the old lines.
The non-African American voters slammed the district as a “sinuous and jagged second majority Black district” that they told the Supreme Court is “based on racial stereotypes, racially ‘balkanizing’ a 250-mile swath of Louisiana.”
“Why, in the 2020s, would Louisiana racially balkanize new areas of a State where Black population is flatlining, integration is succeeding, and the record lacks evidence of voting harms to Black voters?” the plaintiffs asked.
Although Black residents make up roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, the state had just one Black lawmaker in its six-member US House delegation prior to the initial court ruling that led to a second Black-majority district.
Rep. Cleo Fields, a Democrat, captured the seat in last year’s election – adding a second Democrat to the state’s delegation. In raw political terms, the Supreme Court’s decision could leave Fields in power – or it could force a redrawing of the maps before the 2026 election.
The Biden administration submitted a brief to the Supreme Court that technically supported neither party but that urged the justices to reverse a special three-judge district court that would throw out the current map. Days after taking office, the Trump administration submitted a letter declaring that it had “reconsidered the government’s position” and that the earlier brief “no longer represents the position of the United States.”
CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Fredreka Schouten contributed to this report.
