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Louisiana is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a decades-old precedent that has safeguarded minority voting rights, urging the justices to strike down the central provision of the Voting Rights Act and ban any use of race in redistricting.
In a legal brief filed Wednesday, Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the provision that prohibits election practices that discriminate on the basis of race — is unconstitutional when applied to redistricting.
“Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” Murrill and other state attorneys wrote, urging the court to reverse Thornburg v. Gingles, a 1986 ruling that created a framework for determining when minority voters’ power is unlawfully diluted.
“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.”
A direct challenge to Section 2
The case, scheduled for oral arguments Oct. 15 with a decision expected by June 2026, could fundamentally alter how congressional and legislative maps are drawn across the country.
Section 2 has long required states with significant Black, Latino, or Asian populations to draw “majority-minority districts,” ensuring voters of color have a meaningful opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. That provision has been used for decades as a corrective against racial gerrymandering, especially in the South.
Louisiana’s population is roughly one-third Black, but after the 2020 Census, the state legislature initially approved a map with just one majority-Black congressional district out of six. A federal court ruled the map likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to add a second.
The GOP-dominated legislature complied, but a group of non-Black voters sued, arguing the new map discriminated against them. A lower court agreed, setting the stage for the case now before the Supreme Court.
Affirmative action precedent looms large
In its brief, Louisiana leaned heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard,which ended race-conscious college admissions.
“The invidious classifications underlying race-based redistricting present the last significant battle in defense of our ‘color blind’ Constitution,” Louisiana wrote, quoting the Harvard decision. “For ‘[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ That means no quarter for race-based redistricting.”
Who will defend the map?
The state took the unusual step of announcing it will not defend its current congressional map before the justices. That leaves civil rights groups — including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the ACLU — to defend both the map and the constitutionality of Section 2.
“There can be no doubt that racial discrimination persists in Louisiana,” attorneys for Black voters wrote in their filing Wednesday. “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.”
Roberts Court and the Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has steadily narrowed the scope of the Voting Rights Act over the last 15 years. In 2013, the Court struck down the law’s “preclearance” provision, which required certain states with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing election laws. More recently, rulings have chipped away at Section 2.
By agreeing to rehear Louisiana’s case, the Court signaled it is prepared to consider whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
The outcome could determine not only the makeup of Louisiana’s congressional delegation, but also reshape voting rights protections nationwide.
