What we're covering
• Landmark voting rights case: The Supreme Court on Wednesday tossed out Louisiana’s long-contested congressional map as an unconstitutional gerrymander in a decision that could have implications for this year’s midterm election amid a national tug-of-war over which party can eke out the most political advantage in Congress by redrawing district lines.
• Impact on House maps: The decision will make it far harder for plaintiffs to challenge future maps for racial discrimination, undermining a key understanding of the Voting Rights Act.
• Deportation case: After oral arguments today, conservative justices appear ready to back President Donald Trump’s push to end temporary deportation protections for potentially millions of foreign nationals who come from countries enduring war and natural disasters.
Trump on decision limiting the Voting Rights Act: “I love it”
President Donald Trump expressed approval Wednesday for the Supreme Court ruling that limits the reach of the Voting Rights Act, saying “that’s the kind of ruling I like.”
Trump said he had not seen the ruling ahead of a brief question-and-answer session with reporters in the Oval Office, adding he had been with astronauts who were visiting the White House and contractors for his ballroom project.
After a reporter explained that “some think that the ruling could create more Republican-held congressional seats in the South,” Trump replied: “That’s good, that’s the kind of ruling I like.”
SCOTUS ruling cuts against 40 years of understanding about discrimination motive
The Supreme Court’s ruling today makes evidence of a discriminatory motive more central to Voting Rights Act redistricting cases.
The decision cuts against 40 years of understanding that Congress wrote the VRA provision in question to push back not just on intentional racial discriminatory, but on redistricting plans that had the effect of discrimination, even if intentional discrimination couldn’t be proven.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote that VRA plaintiffs could only succeed “when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”
That will make VRA redistricting cases “all but impossible to win,” said Omar Noureldin, senior vice president of the policy & litigation department of the voting rights group Common Cause.
Lawmakers don’t just say out loud that they are drawing maps for the purpose of diluting the political power of communities of color, Noureldin said, and legislative privileges often prevent plaintiffs from getting discovery that would show what their private intentions were.
Intentional discrimination cases are “much rarer than they used to be,” said Jason Torchinsky, an elections lawyer who has represented Republicans in redistricting fights, told CNN.
“You need some sort of smoking gun evidence,” said Torchinsky, who had represented Louisiana in the lower court proceedings in the current case. “You need an email where someone says ‘Yeah, I carved up the Hispanic neighborhood’ and people don’t do that.”
Congress amended the provision in question in 1982 in response to a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that said that succeeding in Voting Rights Act cases required showing purposeful racial discrimination.
Alito said Wednesday that the court was stopping short of requiring a “finding of intentional discrimination.”
Louisiana congressman argues it's too late for state to redistrict
Louisiana Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields, whose district is at the center of today’s voting rights case, argued that it’s too late for the state to put in place a new map for the midterm elections.
The justices “ruled on the merits of the current map and remanded further proceedings” to a lower court, Fields noted in a statement. But he said the ruling “did not require that a new map be immediately drawn.”
“Redrawing maps at this stage would not be prudent. Through qualifying, the voters of Louisiana have already made their decisions as it pertains to November’s ballot, and any changes to the map’s configuration would invalidate their choices.”
State officials in Louisiana have not yet indicated how they will proceed. State Attorney General Liz Murrill said she would work with her state’s legislature and governor on how to proceed with a “constitutionally compliant map” moving forward.
Early voting for Louisiana’s May 16 primary starts Saturday.
GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn calls on Tennessee to redistrict against state's only US House Democrat
US Sen. Marsha Blackburn is pressing state lawmakers in Tennessee to draw another Republican House seat after the Supreme Court’s ruling Wednesday in a landmark voting rights case.
“It’s essential to cement [President Donald Trump’s] agenda and the Golden Age of America,” Blackburn, who is running for governor, wrote on X.
Such a move would likely target the state’s only Democratic House member, Rep. Steve Cohen, who represents Memphis. Tennessee is otherwise represented by eight Republicans in the House. Nashville is already carved into three districts that stretch from the city into the suburbs and out to reliably Republican rural areas.
Tennessee’s midterm primaries are scheduled for August 6.
Wednesday’s decision invalidated Louisiana’s congressional map but also will make it more difficult for plaintiffs to bring challenges to maps in other places for racial discrimination.
Supreme Court signals it will side with Trump to end TPS for Haitian, Syrian migrants
The Supreme Court appeared ready to back President Donald Trump’s push to end temporary deportation protections for potentially millions of foreign nationals who come from countries enduring war and natural disasters.
Temporary Protected Status, which allows an administration to “designate” certain countries facing strife so migrants can remain and work in the United States.
The court’s conservative wing focused not on whether Trump violated federal law or the equal protection clause by ending TPS for Haitians and Syrians but almost entirely on whether a federal court may review such decisions. The law gives the administration broad discretion in turning on and off the designation.
The attorney for the Syrian TPS beneficiaries argued that while a final decision about TPS can’t be reviewed under the law, the process that officials used to get there is. And that process, the attorney said, was influenced entirely by Trump’s “racial animus” directed at Haitians, Syrians and others.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with several others, questioned the rationale that the law barred only the final determination of whether to apply TPS.
Ahilan Arulanantham, who is arguing on behalf of the migrants, said that he believed people should still be able to have “some faith in government” to conduct a thorough and lawful review.
As part of his crackdown on legal and illegal immigration, Trump has ended — rather than extended — TPS for all 13 countries whose designations were set to expire.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that the situation on the ground in Syria is different than it was when the country was designated for TPS. A decision in the case is expected by the end of June.
John Lewis and another bookend for the Voting Rights Act
The late Rep. John Lewis witnessed the signing – and the first steps in the dismantling – of the Voting Rights Act.
As the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling today is analyzed and assessed, I’m thinking back to the morning 13 years ago as I stood alongside Lewis as he watched the court effectively strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in the landmark Shelby case.
Lewis, who died in 2020, was among the last living leaders of the civil rights movement. As a young man, he was on hand when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. As an elder member of Congress, he said he was “shocked, dismayed and disappointed.”
As the fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling is studied, there’s little question today is a moment in history – a bookend to one Lewis witnessed 13 years ago.
Civil rights leaders blast redistricting ruling
Civil rights groups broadly condemned the Supreme Court’s opinion drastically narrowing the reach of the Voting Rights Act.
Rev. Al Sharpton called it “a bullet in the heart of the voting rights movement.”
“The Supreme Court has not just weakened a law, it has humiliated and dismantled the life’s work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and every man and woman who marched, bled, and died for Black Americans to have an equal voice at the ballot box,” Sharpton said in a statement.
The NAACP called the ruling “a devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act, and a license for corrupt politicians who want to rig the system by silencing entire communities.”
“This ruling is a major setback for our nation and threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled, and died for,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said.
The ACLU of Louisiana accused the court of issuing an opinion that “obliterates” voting rights.
“Today, we lost one of the last seatbelts of our democracy,” said the statement from Alanah Odoms, executive director of ACLU of Louisiana.
Geoffrey Pipoly is arguing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Haitians
Geoffrey Pipoly has been fighting the Trump administration on Temporary Protected Status for eight years.
“The secretary’s purported review was a sham,” he told the court as he began his arguments.
Pipoly, an attorney at the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner law firm, was one of the attorneys who sued Trump in 2018 when he attempted to cancel TPS for Haitians during his first term. Lower courts blocked that effort, but the litigation eventually fizzled out when President Joe Biden took office and extended the designation.
“The bottom line is that for reasons I can’t answer, the president simply does not like Haitian people,” Pipoly told the Lawfare podcast earlier this month.
Pipoly is making his debut argument before the justices, but he’s made a splash at the Supreme Court before. He co-authored a humorous friend-of-the-court brief four years ago on behalf of the satirical publication The Onion that drew national attention.
Pipoly clerked for US Circuit Judge Allen Griffin, nominated to the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals by President George W. Bush. He graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School.
Louisiana AG says VRA ruling ends state's "long-running nightmare"
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill celebrated the decision striking down the state’s second Black-majority district and said she would work with her state’s legislature and governor on how to proceed with a “constitutionally compliant map” moving forward.
Here’s Murrill’s full statement:
“We win in Louisiana v. Callais! The Supreme Court has ended Louisiana’s long-running nightmare of federal courts coercing the state to draw a racially discriminatory map. That was always unconstitutional – and this is a seismic decision reaffirming equal protection under our nation’s laws.
“I vigorously defended our first map and said then that the only way to draw a second majority-minority district was to expressly take race into account. We raised our objections at that time to racial gerrymandering, but the district court and the Fifth Circuit directed us to draw the map anyway. It is gratifying that the Supreme Court has finally vindicated our original position and, in doing so, clarified that only under very narrow circumstances - where there is proof of intentional discrimination – may race be used as a remedy under Section 2. It is frustrating that this has taken five years, millions of dollars, and many lost hours to get here. I will continue to work with the Governor and the Legislature to provide guidance as we move forward to adopt a constitutionally compliant map.”
Kavanaugh signals support for Trump's decision to end TPS for Syrians
Justice Brett Kavanaugh is the latest conservative to signal his support for the Trump administration’s decision to pull back legal protections for Syrian nationals temporarily living in the US.
Kavanaugh, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and is sometimes a key vote in high-profile cases, leaned into one of the realities the administration has cited in defense of its decision to yank away Temporary Protected Status for scores of Syrians: Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive regime is no longer in place.
“It’s not the Assad regime anymore though,” Kavanaugh told an attorney representing the Syrian immigrants. “After 53 years of complete oppression and brutal treatment, it’s gone.”
Florida House passes a new congressional map shortly after SCOTUS ruling
The high court’s ruling comes as Florida lawmakers are casting final votes on a new map crafted by Gov. Ron DeSantis that seeks to give Republicans an advantage in four additional districts this fall.
The Florida House approved the map Wednesday morning, about an hour after the Supreme Court’s decision was released. It now heads to the state Senate for final passage, which is expected Wednesday afternoon.
Republicans hold supermajorities in the Florida legislature and made clear they planned to back the DeSantis map during the redistricting special session the governor convened this week without alterations.
In proposing the map before today’s ruling, DeSantis’ legal team cited the looming voting rights case as one of its justifications for moving forward with mid-decade redistricting. His map aims to give Republicans control of 24 of the state’s 28 US House districts.
The Florida vote is the latest salvo in the redistricting battle that has raged around the country since Texas drew new lines to benefit Republicans last year at President Donald Trump’s behest. Just last week, Virginia votes approved a map that could help Democrats flip four Republican US House seats there – although legal challenges to that map continue.
Roberts, Kavanaugh don't explain their switch on the Voting Rights Act from three years ago
The Supreme Court essentially adopted arguments made by Alabama in a separate redistricting case decided three years ago — arguments that two court conservatives rejected then – but are agreeing with now.
Notably, Chief Justice John Roberts — who wrote the 2023 opinion in Allen v Milligan upholding a longstanding interpretation of the Voting Rights Act — didn’t write a concurrence in Wednesday’s Louisiana case to explain why he changed his views or how he squared the new redistricting ruling with the last one.
Neither did Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined Roberts and the three liberals in the Alabama case.
Roberts in 2023 upheld a legal test known as Gingles that the Supreme Court laid out for VRA redistricting cases in 1986.
It said that for voters to prevail in their challenge to redistricting plans, they must show that “the minority group must be sufficiently large and (geographically) compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district,” that the minority group is “cohesive” in its political views and that white voters can vote as a bloc to defeat the minority group’s preferred candidate.
Now, in the Justice Samuel Alito opinion that Roberts has signed on to, the bar plaintiffs must meet in VRA cases is much higher. For instance, it allows states to bake into the defense of their maps gerrymandering done for partisan reasons and the new test demands that plaintiffs lean on evidence of intentional discrimination.
Alito’s majority opinion Wednesday tried to distinguish the Louisiana case from the Alabama case, but much of Wednesday’s ruling co-ops points he made when he dissented in 2023.
This post has been updated with additional information.
Liberal justices point to Trump’s derogatory comments about Haitians
Two liberal justices cited President Donald Trump’s negative comments about Haitians during oral arguments over the administration’s termination of temporary protected status for more than 350,000 immigrants from the country.
“Now we have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a quote filthy, dirty and disgusting shithole country, I’m quoting him,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, adding that the statement is an example of “showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”
Sotomayor also pointed to Trump’s complaints that the US “takes people from such countries instead of people from Norway, Sweden or Denmark,” and that he “declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America.”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer responded that the statements referred to “problems like crime, poverty, welfare dependence, drugs, drug importation.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether the court was allowed to take into account Trump’s insistence that immigrants from certain countries — largely Black African immigrants — are not allowed to come to the US and his calling them names, while he welcomes immigrants from places like Norway and Denmark, as well as White South Africans. She referenced the president’s claim that Haitians are eating people’s pets.
The Haitian TPS holders who are plaintiffs in the case argue that the administration’s decision to allow their protections to lapse stem in part from racial animus.
Conservative justices signal courts are unable to review TPS decisions
Several of the court’s conservative justices are stuck on the idea that federal courts don’t even have the power to review an administration’s TPS decisions. It’s a particularly bad sign for the foreign nationals challenging President Donald Trump’s effort.
“I really don’t understand how you can prevail” if the court interprets the law as it has in the past, said Justice Samuel Alito. The law at issue says that federal courts can’t review a “determination” on whether or not to designate a country like Syria for TPS.
The attorney for the Syrian TPS beneficiaries argued that while a final decision couldn’t be reviewed, the process that officials used to get there is.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed to doubt that.
“Why would Congress permit review of the procedural aspect when really what everybody cares about is the substance?” Barrett asked.
Ahilan Arulanantham, who is arguing on behalf of the migrants, said that he believed people should still be able to have “some faith in government” to conduct a thorough and lawful review.
That so many of the conservative justices are focused on the threshold question of whether lower courts have the power to review the case means they have spent almost no time discussing whether the Trump administration’s decision violated federal law or the equal protection clause.
Ahilan Arulanantham is arguing on behalf of the Syrian immigrants
Veteran Supreme Court litigator Ahilan T. Arulanantham is now at the lectern arguing on behalf of Syrian immigrants challenging President Donald Trump’s decision to yank away legal protections for them.
“The bottom line is this: The secretary can terminate TPS, but he must turn square corners and follow the rules Congress set,” he told the justices. “In contrast, as we’ve heard today, the government reads the statute like a blank check.”
A professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law and the co-director of the school’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, Arulanantham has a long resume of litigating high-stakes immigration cases.
He’s appeared before the justices several times before, including in 2021, when he urged the court to allow three Muslim men to sue the Federal Bureau of Investigation for hiring a confidential informant to spy on them. The justices ultimately rejected his arguments in that case.
He also handled a challenge from Trump’s first term to the president’s effort back then to revoke Temporary Protected Status for thousands of immigrants from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador.
The son of Sri Lankan immigrants, Arulanantham previously worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and was for a time a public defender in Texas, according to his biography. He graduated from Yale Law School and also holds degrees from Georgetown University and Oxford University.
Meanwhile, federal court won't rehear Trump’s appeal of E. Jean Carroll's jury award
A split federal appeals court said its full bench of judges would not rehear President Donald Trump’s appeal of the $83 million jury award for defaming magazine columnist E Jean Carroll.
The decision paves the way for Trump to ask the US Supreme Court to hear his arguments involving presidential immunity following its landmark decision.
In a split decision, a majority of judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied Trump’s motion to have his appeal heard “en banc” or by the full bench of judges.
The decision is the latest turn in a six -year legal battle between Carroll and Trump that resulted in two civil trials including one where Trump briefly took the witness stand.
“The American People stand with President Trump in demanding an immediate end to the unlawful, radical weaponization of our justice system, and a swift dismissal of all of the Witch Hunts, including the illegal, Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes—the defense of which the Attorney General has determined is legally required to be taken over by the Department of Justice because Carroll based her false claims on the President’s official acts,” a spokesman for Trump’s legal team told CNN. “President Trump and his legal team will be appealing this decision as he continues to fight against, and consistently defeat, Liberal Lawfare.”
Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, also issued a statement:
“E. Jean Carroll is eager for this case, originally filed in 2019, to be over so that she can finally obtain justice.”
House speaker: "We'll see" how VRA decision shapes midterms
House Speaker Mike Johnson said “we’ll see” what impact the Supreme Court’s Wednesday morning ruling will have on upcoming elections amid the ongoing arms race between the parties to reshape district lines and bolster political power ahead of the midterms.
Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told reporters he had not had time to read through the opinion that throws out Louisiana’s congressional map, but that he had “just talked to some folks who have gone through it, and they said that this is obviously the right result.”
Johnson said the 6-3 decision, backed by the court’s conservative justices, was “the obvious result.”
“So we’ll see what effect it has. We have, as you know, a primary coming up in about two weeks. So we’ll see if the state legislature deems it appropriate to go in and draw new maps,” he said.
Louisiana’s statewide primaries are on May 16.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, meanwhile, argued that “Right wing conservatives have been attacking the right to vote for decades.”
“It’s not a surprise that they are continuing to try to undermine the ability of every single American to participate in a free and fair election. We’re not going to step back. We will continue to fight back,” he said.
Asked by CNN how this ruling impacts the midterm elections, Jeffries said, “House Democrats are going to win the majority.”
Liberal justices grill Trump lawyer on TPS termination as conservatives stay mostly on the sidelines
The court’s three liberal justices are grilling Solicitor General D. John Sauer about President Donald Trump’s decision to yank away legal protections for thousands of non-citizens from Syria and Haiti while their conservative colleagues have mostly stayed on the sidelines.
Arguments are still in their earliest round and the dynamic at play thus far could quickly change. But the fact that only two conservative justices have asked tough questions of the government could spell trouble for the immigrants who brought the legal challenges before the court.
In looking skeptically at Sauer’s arguments, some of the liberal justices have pointed to offensive comments Trump has previously made about Haiti and glowing statements he’s made about majority-White countries.
“I don’t see how that one statement” doesn’t show a “discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision,” Sotomayor told Sauer.
Louisiana Secretary of State reviewing decision on Voting Rights Act
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry just issued a statement on the ruling:
“My lawyers are currently analyzing the opinion. We are limited in what we can say at this time as this continues to be active litigation, with the case remanded for proceedings back to the Western District.”
Louisiana’s midterm primaries are scheduled for May 16. Early voting is scheduled to begin on Saturday, May 2.
Ruling will trigger a redistricting special session in Mississippi – for judges
One immediate impact of Wednesday’s ruling will come in Mississippi, where the state’s Republican Gov. Tate Reeves recently announced plans to call a special legislative session 21 days after the high court’s voting rights decision.
The Mississippi redistricting session, he said, would focus on drawing new boundaries for the state’s Supreme Court justices, who are elected.
A federal judge ruled last year that the electoral lines for the state court violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power.
