Louisiana GOP map guts majority-Black district after legislature acts on Supreme Court ruling

The Louisiana legislature, driven by Republican supermajorities and emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court's April 2026 decision in *Louisiana v. Callais* (No. 25-123), has passed a congressional redistricting map that eliminates one of the state's two majority-Black districts. The map, which now awaits the governor's expected signature, reconfigures district lines to give Republicans a fifth seat in the six-member delegation, effectively diluting Black voting power in a state where African Americans make up roughly one-third of the population. The Supreme Court's ruling, which struck down the previous map as an illegal racial gerrymander, severely weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the primary federal tool for combating racial discrimination in redistricting. This decision enabled state Republicans to dismantle a district that had been drawn to comply with the VRA, and to replace it with a map that packs Black voters into a single district while cracking others across neighboring Republican-leaning districts. The move was passed on a party-line vote, with Democratic state senators like Royce Duplessis denouncing the rush and the flawed data underlying the new map. The immediate harm is to Black voters in Louisiana, who lose a second district where they could elect candidates of their choice — a constitutional right affirmed by decades of VRA enforcement. More broadly, the map signals a national shift: after the Supreme Court's gutting of Section 2, legislatures in other states — particularly Texas, Georgia, and Alabama — may similarly reduce minority representation, further entrenching a political system that privileges partisan advantage over democratic inclusion.