WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map Wednesday, finding the Pelican State unconstitutionally added a second majority-black House district in a major decision that is likely to pave the way for Republicans to make major redistricting gains across southern states.

Louisiana had been forced by a federal judge to create a second majority-black district in 2024 to comply with Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which restricts states from diluting minority votes.

The Trump administration and state officials challenged the new map, arguing it was a racial gerrymander in violation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law.

The high court agreed, with all six conservative justices voting to get rid of the 2024 boundaries.

However, the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito stopped short of finding Section 2 of the VRA unconstitutional, as many activists had feared. 

Instead, the Supreme Court for the first time explicitly held that compliance with Section 2 can “provide a compelling reason for race-based districting” — but Louisiana’s situation did not meet that bar. 

“In short, [Section 2] imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race,” Alito wrote. “Not only does this interpretation follow from the plain text of [Section 2], but it is consistent with the limited authority that the Fifteenth Amendment confers.”

“Section 2 does not provide a compelling interest [in Louisiana] because the State did not need to create a new majority-minority district to comply with the Act,” he later added.

Alito’s ruling relied heavily on 1986’s Thornburg v. Gingles, which laid out four criteria for courts to determine whether a state needs to redraw its districts due to a Section 2 violation: Geographic distribution of minority voters, whether a district is “reasonably configured,” whether the minority group votes as a bloc, and the “totality of the circumstances.”

Wednesday’s opinion updated each of the four Gingles criteria to make it clear that plaintiffs have to account for partisan interests when alleging that a congressional map was an illegal racial gerrymander. 

“If the State’s aims in drawing a map include a target partisan distribution of voters, a specific margin of victory for certain incumbents, or any other goal not prohibited by the Constitution, the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps must achieve these goals just as well,” Alito concluded. 

“If not, the plaintiffs would fail to demonstrate that the State’s chosen map was driven by racial considerations rather than permissible aims.”

The decision could clear the way for other states to ditch district boundaries meant to augment African-American votes by the landmark civil rights legislation. 

Roughly one-third of Louisiana residents are African-American, and the state’s only two Democratic lawmakers in Congress (compared to four House Republicans) were elected from the majority-black districts.

According to one analysis from Democratic voting groups Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund, Republican officials could redraw 19 congressional districts in the South and Midwest to be significantly more favorable to the GOP as a direct result of Wednesday’s ruling.

However, it’s not clear if red states will be able to seize on the Supreme Court’s decision in time to significantly impact the 2026 midterms, in which Democrats are favored to retake the House of Representatives.

Republican-appointed Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion that he “would go further and hold that [Section 2] of the Voting Rights Act does not regulate districting at all.”

Democrat-appointed Justice Elena Kagan penned a blistering dissent joined by her liberal colleagues. 

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan argued. “Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”

She ripped Alito for presenting updates to the Gingles test as “technical tweaks,” and argued that, in reality, those adjustments “eviscerate the law.”

“The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave,” she later added. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

The Supreme Court’s decision comes in the middle of a redistricting arms race in red and blue states across the country. Last week, Democrats scored a major referendum victory in Virginia that sets the stage for them to make as many as four more congressional seats lean in their direction, should that effort survive legal challenges. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are looking at potential redistricting opportunities in Florida and Mississippi in additon to Lousiana.

The justices initially took up the Louisiana map case during the 2024-25 term, but in a rare move, ordered both sides to restate their arguments to consider both the 14th and 15th Amendments, the latter of which stipulates that states cannot deny citizens equal protection under the law nor abridge their rights on the basis of race.