The ruling, expected next summer, could end decades of race-based redistricting
The Supreme Court appears ready to ban the use of race in determining congressional districts, a move that could trigger redistricting efforts ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
“In a dispute over a Louisiana voting map, the conservative majority signaled it might prohibit using race as a factor in creating election districts,” the New York Times reported, noting that striking down the race-conscious redistricting approach, established by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, could allow “Republican state legislatures to eliminate at least a dozen Democratic-held House districts across the South.”
Several of the conservative-leaning justices “appeared focused on” whether race-based redistricting aimed at helping black voters should have a time limit, according to the Times report. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, said that while “race-based remedies are permissible” for years and even decades, the approach “should not be indefinite and should have an end point.”
For years, the Court’s conservative-leaning justices have emphasized the need to return to a colorblind interpretation of the Constitution, the Times‘s report notes. They argue that the Voting Rights Act’s race-conscious redistricting violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires that the law treat everyone equally.
The Court will likely release a ruling on the race-based method next summer. “The court typically issues major rulings by late June or early July, and the next major vote is the 2026 midterm elections in November,” the Times reported Wednesday.
It is unclear whether a ruling will come in time to affect the midterms, according to the Times.
The legal battle first began after the 2020 census showed Louisiana’s black population had grown to around a third of the state’s total, yet only one of its six congressional districts had a black majority, the Times recounts. Some black voters sued in 2022, alleging that lawmakers had packed black voters into a single district in violation of the Voting Rights Act. A federal judge agreed, prompting legislators to draw a new map in early 2024 that added a second majority-black district.
Soon after, a group of white voters challenged the revised map, saying it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. They argued that the new district was drawn primarily on the basis of race and amounted to “unlawful, intentional discrimination based on race,” according to the report.
Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill (R.), who petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case, in a brief earlier this month denounced race-based redistricting as “unworkable and unconstitutional.”
“No amount of surgery can eliminate the constitutional defects inherent in a system that, at the end of the day, requires States to sort their citizens by race,” Murrill wrote.
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