What we covered here:
• Major case: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning in a major case that threatens to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Louisiana v. Callais centers on the creation of a second Black-majority congressional district in the state.
• National impact: While the dispute is focused on Louisiana’s congressional map, the outcome will have nationwide implications. Voting rights groups who warn that undermining some of the law’s protections for redistricting risks “wiping out minority representation and re-segregating legislatures, city councils, and school boards.”
• Potential future reversal: Signals from the conservative majority today have pointed to a potential reversal on the Louisiana map with a possible retrenchment of the landmark civil rights law.
• 2026 midterms: How far the court goes could also impact the balance of power in the US House after the midterm elections. A ruling for Louisiana could prompt a redrawing of districts by other GOP-led states that would almost certainly give a boost to Republicans.
Our live coverage of the Supreme Court arguments has ended for the day. Scroll through the posts below to catch up on today’s developments.
Sketches from inside the Supreme Court
Sketch artist Dana Verkouteren was in court for today’s oral arguments on the Voting Rights Act. See her sketches here:
Supreme Court conservatives open to further eroding power of Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority signaled deep skepticism today over a second majority Black district drawn in Louisiana, despite a lower court ruling that found the district was likely necessary to respect the landmark Voting Rights Act.
At issue is a second majority Black district drawn in Louisiana following the 2020 census that elected Rep. Cleo Fields, a Democrat, to the House. The state drew that district in response to a lower court that found the state likely violated the landmark 1965 civil rights law with the initial version of its map.
Key to the argument was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who just two years ago was the deciding vote upholding the Voting Rights Act provision in a case involving Alabama’s map. This time around, Kavanaugh repeatedly leaned into two points suggesting he had reservations with Louisiana’s map.
Kavanaugh, a conservative, and others signaled an interest in the Trump administration’s approach to the Louisiana case. The Trump administration sided with Louisiana – and against the Black voters – but in a way that would likely erode the power of the Voting Rights Act while not gutting it entirely.
Kavanaugh also returned to an argument about whether the Voting Rights Act can indefinitely require the drawing of “remedial” majority-minority districts. In other contexts, including college admissions, the court has ruled that such race-based decision making must have some sort of time limit.
At one point, Kavanaugh quoted from earlier decisions suggesting that “race-based districting” embarks the nation on a “most dangerous course.”
Early on, Chief Justice John Roberts – who joined with Kavanaugh and the court’s liberals in the Alabama case two years ago – quickly sought to draw a distinction between that outcome and the Louisiana case, suggesting he didn’t see the earlier precedent as controlling this case.
The court’s three-justice liberal wing focused much of its fire on Congress’s intent in enacting the landmark Voting Rights Act in 1965: to root out discrimination that targeted African American voters. They have questioned the Trump administration’s approach, suggesting it would require plaintiffs to meet a much higher standard than is required by the Voting Rights Act to find discriminatory maps.
Supreme Court do-overs can mean big things
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments Wednesday on Louisiana’s congressional map is highly unusual: It is a rare instance in which the justices are engaging in a do-over.
The court already heard arguments in the Louisiana case in March, during its last term. Instead of handing down a decision in June, the court announced on its final day that it intended to schedule a new set of arguments in the case.
Such re-arguments have often occurred in high-profile cases. Roe v. Wade, the case that established a constitutional right to abortion, was first argued in 1971 and again in 1972. The precedent was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022.
Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that found school segregation unconstitutional, was argued in 1952 and then argued again in 1953.
More recently, the high court argued the landmark campaign finance case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2009 and then again in 2010.
Decision could have wide-ranging impacts nationwide
The case before the Supreme Court is about Louisiana’s congressional districts, but the decision will almost certainly have national implications.
For one thing, it could ultimately reduce the number of representatives of color at all levels of government.
Voting rights groups warn that a ruling in Louisiana’s favor risks “wiping out minority representation and re-segregating legislatures, city councils, and school boards.”
That would be most immediately apparent for Rep. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat from Louisiana who represents the state’s disputed 6th Congressional District. A ruling for Louisiana would almost certainly mean a significant redrawing of his congressional district.
Because race and politics are often closely intertwined, a ruling in the case could change the balance of power in the House after the 2026 midterm election. A ruling for Louisiana could prompt a redrawing of districts by other GOP-led states that would almost certainly give a boost to Republicans.
And because it’s Louisiana, the case could also affect the districts of key House leaders, notably Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise – both Republicans who represent the state in Congress.
How the Louisiana maps have changed
Analysis: Gingles all the way
A 39-year-old precedent, Thornburg v. Gingles, is playing a central role in the Supreme Court’s oral arguments today over the Voting Rights Act.
As part of its argument before the court, Louisiana officials have specifically called for the Gingles precedent to be overturned.
The case dealt with North Carolina’s legislative districts that were challenged by Black voters as violating the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed with them.
But the lasting legacy of the opinion is as the standard courts use to determine if a violation of the Voting Rights Act has occurred. Congress specifically declined to endorse the idea of “proportionality” – the idea that a third of districts should be available to Black candidates if African Americans make up a third of the population. Instead, courts look to the “Gingles factors.”
First, a plaintiff must establish that a racial minority group is large enough and compact enough to make up a majority of a district. Second, plaintiffs must show that the group at issue is “politically cohesive.” Then, plaintiffs must demonstrate that the majority group (i.e. White voters) vote sufficiently together to defeat a minority group’s preferred candidate.
If a plaintiff challenging a map can meet those requirements, courts then look to what’s known as the “totality of the circumstances” to determine if the district boundaries leave minority voters with “less opportunity than White voters to elect representatives of their choice.” Those can include factors like how much success minority candidates have in state elections as well as the state’s past history of racial discrimination.
Former Scalia clerk Hashim Mooppan is arguing for Trump administration
Hashim Mooppan, a veteran attorney who has taken on several high-profile Supreme Court cases at the Justice Department this year, is now speaking on behalf of the Trump administration.
Mooppan, a former clerk to the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, is the principal deputy solicitor general. Prior to joining the Trump administration, he was a partner at the Jones Day law firm.
Even casual court observers may be familiar with Mooppan, a rising star who just argued another case before the high court involving “conversion therapy.” In that case, the administration sided with a licensed counselor in Colorado who is challenging the state’s ban on the discredited practice.
Mooppan was also a counselor to the solicitor general during the first Trump administration. The Trump administration is siding with Louisiana in the current redistricting fight.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh sends a message to his colleagues
Justices often use oral arguments to signal to their colleagues how a case should be resolved, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appears to using his questions about Louisiana’s congressional map and the Voting Rights Act to do just that.
Kavanaugh, a conservative, has repeatedly signaled an interest in the Trump administration’s approach to the case. The Trump administration sided with Louisiana – and against the Black voters in the case – but in a way that is slightly less far reaching than the state’s argument when it comes to the Voting Rights Act.
The Trump administration has suggested that race might still be used in a limited way to redraw district boundaries in some circumstances. Louisiana has argued, by comparison, that race cannot be used at all. Just how that delta might play out in practice is not entirely clear but, at least in this case, Louisiana’s current map would need to be redrawn under the Trump administration’s approach.
Kavanaugh, at one point, told the attorney for Louisiana that he thought the Trump administration’s approach “solves a lot of the concerns that you’ve identified.”
Liberal justices likely to dominate rest of arguments
The lineup of attorneys in the case has affected the cadence of the Supreme Court’s arguments in an unusual way. Because Louisiana switched its position – and no longer supports its own map – only one attorney stood before the justices to defend the current map, which includes a second Black majority district.
That attorney was Janai Nelson, with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. She faced tough and skeptical questions from Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and others.
Subsequent attorneys all believe that Louisiana’s map should be tossed – based on different legal reasons. And now it is likely to be the court’s three-justice liberal wing – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – who will likely do the most speaking.
Edward Greim, who fought IRS during Obama years, repping plaintiffs
Edward Greim, an attorney who fought the IRS during the Obama administration over its scrutiny of conservative groups, is speaking on behalf of the “non-Black” voters who sued over the current version of Louisiana’s map.
Greim, a Missouri native and 2002 Harvard Law graduate, argued the same case when the justices heard it previously in March.
Greim represented a group of Tea Party advocates in a high-profile, class action legal case alleging the IRS aggressively scrutinized conservative groups during the Obama administration. The case resulted in a settlement in 2017.
Greim is arguing on behalf of a group of “non-Black” plaintiffs who alleged Louisiana’s updated map violated the 14th and 15th Amendments, which were ratified after the Civil War.
Sotomayor stresses that race has traditionally been used in the redistricting process
Justice Sonia Sotomayor stressed at one point that race has traditionally been used lawfully in the redistricting process as she pushed back on Louisiana’s argument that it cannot be used to remedy violations of the Voting Rights Act.
“Race is a part of redistricting always… Race is always a part of these decisions, and my colleagues are trying to tease it out in this intellectual way that doesn’t deal with the fact that race is used to help people,” Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, told Louisiana Solicitor General Ben Aguiñaga.
“Legislators might try to keep an ethnic community in one district. They might consider it to get a sense of which district to draw an incumbent into. They might review it to predict what kind of issues a district voter might be particularly interested in. They might use it to inform partisan goals,” she said. “We permit all of that.”
Roberts once called Louisiana's 6th District a "snake"
The congressional district that kicked off the current Supreme Court case is Louisiana’s 6th District, currently held by Rep. Cleo Fields, a Democrat.
The district 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.
Earlier this year, Chief Justice John Roberts referred to it as a “snake.” That’s important because one of the traditional goals for mapmakers is to draw congressional districts that are “compact.”
“If you look at CD6, what does ‘reasonably compact’ mean?” Roberts said during the first arguments in March. “I mean, it’s – it’s a snake that runs from one end of the state to the other. I mean, how is that compact?”
Conservative justices show early skepticism of Louisiana’s congressional map
Several conservative Supreme Court justices signaled skepticism over the creation of a second majority Black district in Louisiana in the early stages of oral arguments Wednesday.
In a mostly subdued series of questions, the conservative justices – notably Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh – asked questions that at least suggested concerns with Louisiana’s drawing of a second Black majority district.
It wasn’t until roughly 45 minutes into arguments that some of them began raising fundamental constitutional questions about the use of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Kavanaugh was perhaps the most important questioner during the first round. At one point, he quoted from earlier decisions suggesting that “race-based districting” embarks the nation on a “most dangerous course.”
The Donald Trump-nominated justice also repeatedly returned to the question of whether states can rely on the Voting Rights Act to draw majority-minority districts indefinitely.
Ben Aguiñaga, former Alito clerk, is arguing for Louisiana
Ben Aguiñaga, the top appellate attorney for the state of Louisiana, is at the podium on behalf of the Pelican State.
A former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito and a Texas native, Aguiñaga has argued at the Supreme Court twice before, including once when justices heard this same case in March. He also argued on behalf of states who last year alleged that the government’s efforts to combat online misinformation amounted to a form of unconstitutional censorship.
Aguiñaga received his law degree from Louisiana State University in 2015 and clerked for US Circuit Judge Edith Jones on the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
He spent a year as the chief of staff for the Civil Rights Division at the US Department of Justice during President Donald Trump’s first administration. He was an attorney at Jones Day for nearly five years before joining the Louisiana attorney general’s office in early 2024.
Attorney for Black voters tells Kagan that gutting Section 2 would be "pretty catastrophic"
When Justice Elena Kagan asked an attorney for Black voters in Louisiana what the “results on the ground” would be if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the lawyer made no bones about how devastating she believed the outcome would be.
“Were Section Two to cease to operate in the way that you just described … what could happen? What would the results on the ground be?” Kagan, a member of the court’s liberal wing, asked Janai Nelson.
“I think the results would be pretty catastrophic,” Nelson responded quickly.
She continued: “If we take Louisiana as one example, every congressional member who is Black was elected from a VRA opportunity district.”
Key vote Brett Kavanaugh says race-based redistricting can’t last forever
Justice Brett Kavanaugh is pressing on a point that is central to the case: Whether redistricting that takes race into account should be allowed to carry on indefinitely.
It’s potentially a signal that Kavanaugh is skeptical of the position raised by Black voters. The Supreme Court raised a similar point in striking down affirmative action admissions policies in 2023.
“This court’s cases, in a variety of contexts, has said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time,” the conservative justice asked. “But that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point. What exactly do you think the end point should be?”
Janai Nelson, representing the Black voters in Louisiana, has argued that the Voting Rights Act has a time limit built in, because states must redraw their maps with a new census every decade.
Have Voting Rights Act suits run amok?
One of the arguments Louisiana and critics of the Voting Rights Act is making is that the confusion around how to apply the law in redistricting has spurred a bevy of lawsuits, even as minority representation has increased and housing segregation has decreased.
That line of attack has drawn some interest from conservative justices in the past.
But an interesting brief from the Voting Rights Initiative at the University of Michigan Law School has made the opposition point: The number of vote dilution lawsuits based on Section 2 of the VRA, it says, has gone down.
Janai Nelson, representing the Black voters in Louisiana, pointed to that brief early in her arguments on Wednesday.
According to that brief, the number of Section 2 vote claims has almost halved over recent decades.
“Courts today adjudicate far fewer Section 2 vote dilution claims, and find far fewer Section 2 violations, than in prior decades,” the brief claims.
But... John Roberts questions whether previous Alabama precedent applies
In his typical understated way, Chief Justice John Roberts threw some early shade in his opening question on the idea that Supreme Court already decided this case in favor of the Voting Rights Act two years ago.
His pushback is important because the attorney for Black voters in the case noted the court just upheld the Voting Rights Act in a similar redistricting case dealing with Alabama two years ago. Roberts was having none of it – suggesting he doesn’t believe the Alabama case resolves the issue.
Roberts supported the Voting Rights Act in the Alabama case. His vote is likely up for grabs in the Louisiana appeal.
In that case, Roberts said, the court “considered Alabama’s particular challenge” not necessarily one that would apply to Louisiana.
Didn’t SCOTUS just look at this two years ago? (A: Yes)
If the Supreme Court ultimately sides with Louisiana and overturns a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the outcome will beg an obvious question: Why didn’t the court do it two years ago?
Way back in 2023, a 5-4 majority of the high court ordered Alabama officials to redraw that state’s congressional map to allow an additional Black majority district. That outcome came even though Alabama raised some of the same arguments then that Louisiana is raising now.
That decision came as a surprise, after oral arguments suggested a majority was likely on Alabama’s side.
And some of the language in that opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is particularly striking when viewed alongside the arguments Louisiana is making in its appeal. Louisiana, for instance, has come out strong for the prospect that the Constitution requires a colorblind approach to redistricting.
“The contention that mapmakers must be entirely ‘blind’ to race has no footing” in the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents, Roberts wrote in 2023.
“The line that we have long drawn is between consciousness and predominance.”
It would take only one justice to switch votes in that case, Allen v.
Milligan, to land on a different outcome for Louisiana.
