Supreme Court guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and voids Louisiana's majority-Black district in Louisiana v. Callais

The Court executed two distinct but mutually reinforcing legal moves in Callais, and confusing them is itself a civil-rights danger. The first move was constitutional: the 6-3 majority held that Louisiana's 2024 map—drawn in direct response to a federal court order finding vote dilution under the VRA—was itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The majority reasoned that 'allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context,' and concluded that VRA compliance could not supply the compelling interest needed to justify the map. This is a Fourteenth/Fifteenth Amendment holding: the Court used the Equal Protection framework to declare that the race-conscious remedy Black voters won in court was itself unconstitutional.

The second move was statutory: without formally striking down Section 2, the majority rewrote its operative standard. For four decades, Section 2 had imposed liability based on discriminatory results—the effects-based 'totality of circumstances' test rooted in the 1982 amendments and applied through Thornburg v. Gingles. The Callais majority reread that standard to impose liability only 'when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.' This is not the same as the constitutional holding—it is a separate reinterpretation of what the statute itself demands. As the Brennan Center's Michael Li put it, the Court 'modified what you have to do to win a Section 2 case in ways that will make it much harder or impossible for voters of color to use.' These two moves together—constitutional and statutory—are what Justice Kagan meant when she wrote that the decision renders Section 2 'all but a dead letter.'

The practical consequences are already cascading. An estimated 70 of the 435 congressional districts have historically depended on Section 2 protection. Analyses by Fair Fight Action, Black Voters Matter, and NPR suggest the ruling puts at risk at least 15 House seats currently held by Black members of Congress, and could eventually flip as many as 19 majority-minority seats held by Democrats. Republican-controlled states including Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, and Ohio either already initiated mid-decade redistricting or moved within hours of the ruling. As Kareem Crayton of the Brennan Center observed, the Court's steady erosion of the VRA has amounted to 'burying it without the funeral.' The DOJ Civil Rights Division—which has enforced Section 2 for nearly 70 years—now faces a statutory landscape so narrowed that its redistricting enforcement capacity has been effectively destroyed by judicial reinterpretation, with no legislative fix on the horizon.

What Congress and DOJ must do is clear, even if the path is harder. Congress enacted the VRA under its explicit enforcement power under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, as Sherrilyn Ifill has argued—that constitutional authority has not disappeared. A legislative fix restoring the effects-based standard, grounded squarely in the Reconstruction Amendments' enforcement clauses, would be constitutionally defensible and morally obligatory. In the interim, the Civil Rights Division must deploy every remaining tool: Section 2 cases built on the strongest possible record of intentional discrimination, Section 3 preclearance 'bail-in' petitions in jurisdictions with documented histories, and aggressive enforcement of the constitutional floor the Fifteenth Amendment itself provides. Abandoning Black and Latino voters to a redistricting free-for-all—as this administration has done by siding with the challengers—is not neutrality. It is a choice to let the Jim Crow-era architecture of dilution return, repainted as colorblindness.