When the dust settled at the end of the 2025 Supreme Court term, one case was left standing: Louisiana v. Callais. The Court didn’t issue a decision despite having oral argument, instead punting the case to the next term. Now we know why. On Friday, the Court issued a supplemental order asking the parties to argue whether Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-Black voting district violates the Constitution. Here’s why the order is a bleak preview of the next generation of gerrymandering, and the possible death of the Voting Rights Act.
In 2024, the Louisiana state legislature had a problem. The state’s previous congressional district map had been ruled unconstitutional because it diluted Black votes (despite the state being almost a third Black, only one of its six districts was majority-Black). But creating an additional majority-Black district would put one of Louisiana’s Republican incumbents in the House (like Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise, the two highest-ranking House Republicans) at risk of losing their seat (or worse, having to appeal to Black voters). The solution was to create this map, with four normal-ish-shaped districts and two comically stretched-out majority-Black districts cutting across the state from Shreveport to New Orleans.
You might notice that Shreveport is sliced up so that Mike Johnson’s house is in a safe, almost entirely rural district, while the rest of the city is districted with Baton Rouge, 250 miles away. Image: Democracy Docket
Why is this a problem? After the new map was implemented, a group of “non-African American voters” (read: white Republicans) sued, claiming that by using race as a factor to draw the new map, the state had violated the 14th and 15th Amendments. The VRA requires states to take race into consideration to ensure that minorities aren’t discriminated against (or, as in this case, to remedy discrimination). The issue is that using an analysis of race to ensure discrimination against minorities isn’t happening is the same to Court conservatives as actively discriminating against white voters.
If the Supreme Court rules that requiring Louisiana to draw a second minority-majority district violates the constitution, the Civil Rights landmark Voting Rights Act would be all but dead. But it wouldn’t be the first time the Court struck down a core provision of the act. In 2013, John Roberts struck down preclearance in Shelby County v. Holder. Prior to 2013, some states with a history of discriminating against minority voters had to have changes to their voting laws cleared by the Department of Justice before they could go into effect. Roberts wrote at the time that preclearance was unconstitutional because “our country has changed” since the era of Jim Crow. Not that much—in the decade since, states have implemented more than 100 voting restrictions, many of which make it more difficult for people of color to vote.
The fact is that it’s not possible for Louisiana to do these three things at once: (i) protect incumbents, (ii) draw normal-looking districts, and (iii) respect Black votes. Our bet: the Supreme Court will rule that Mike Johnson’s reelection is more important than the rights of minority voters.
