Case Before Supreme Court Could Destroy Voting Rights Act and Cement GOP Control of House 'For At Least a Generation'
If the court dismantles Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and allows overtly racist gerrymanders, one report estimates that Republicans will be virtually guaranteed an additional 19 seats in the 2026 midterms.
The US Supreme Court will rehear a case on Wednesday that could strike a death blow to the Voting Rights Act and, in the process, virtually guarantee that Republicans hang on to power in the 2026 midterm elections and well into the future.
At issue in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, is Section 2 of the VRA, which outlaws racially discriminatory redistricting. Max Flugrath, communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, wrote for Slate that "by taking the unusual step of reopening arguments, legal experts believe, the court's far-right majority may have telegraphed its intent to dismantle Section 2."
"If it falls, the impact will reverberate far beyond Louisiana, reshaping political power across the entire country," he said.
According to a report from Fair Fight and Black Voters Matter, if Section 2 is dismantled, it would guarantee Republicans an additional 19 safe seats in the US House of Representatives, and as many as 27 when combined with the GOP’s Trump-led push for mid-decade gerrymandering.
"It's enough to cement one-party control of the US House for at least a generation," according to the report.
The origins of the case itself are highly unusual. It began typically enough, with a conservative Fifth Circuit Court affirming a lower court's ruling that the congressional maps drawn by the state GOP in 2022 constituted an illegal racial gerrymander. Despite Black residents making up roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, many of them were crammed into a single district, while the other five in the state remained majority white.
After the court ruling, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry convened an emergency legislative session to draw new maps that complied with the court's order and granted another majority-Black district. But shortly after the map was finalized, it was challenged by a group of white voters, who alleged that by drawing new maps that gave Black voters fairer representation, Louisiana's legislature was effectively enacting an illegal racial gerrymander against voters who are not Black.
"Their logic twists the 14th and 15th Amendments—which were themselves created to protect voting rights—in an attempt to destroy them," Flugrath said. "The argument should have been laughed out of court. Instead, a lower court embraced it, and an appeal was accepted by the Supreme Court."
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the new case in March, but—in an extraordinarily rare move—chose not to issue a ruling. Instead, it punted the case to its next term in October, directing the parties involved to center their arguments on the question of whether the Fifth Circuit's requirement for the legislature to create a second majority-minority district violated the 14th or 15th Amendments.
Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Louisiana Illuminator that it was "an ominous question" for the court to pose because it would allow for states to carry out racially motivated redistricting while removing the legal framework to counter them.
The Supreme Court rejected similar claims of discrimination against white people in the 2022 Allen v. Milligan case out of Alabama, which the court decided 5-4 with conservative Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the three liberals to uphold section 2.
However, Kavanaugh signaled that he may be willing to side with such arguments in different circumstances. He noted in his concurring opinion that he agreed with a point made by Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent that "even if Congress… could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under Section 2 for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future."
As Matt Ford wrote for the New Republic in July, "The temporal argument, as Kavanaugh phrased it, is telling":
In the mid-20th century, the federal government dismantled nearly all of the legal architecture of Jim Crow racial apartheid in the American South and elsewhere. Congress enacted powerful laws like the Voting Rights Act that created new tools to challenge specific laws and practices. The Supreme Court's liberal majority overturned past errors like Plessy v. Ferguson, which entrenched de jure racial segregation, and breathed new life into the Reconstruction-era amendments.
The Roberts Court is apparently unwilling to strike down those laws or overturn those rulings on the merits—that is to say, they have yet to rule that those civil rights efforts were unconstitutional in the 1950s or 1960s. Doing so would be tantamount to embracing Jim Crow again. Instead, they have argued that the laws and rulings are no longer permissible because they solved the problem, or at least have done so sufficiently to render them unnecessary.
Assuming all the other conservatives stay the course, Kavanaugh alone switching sides in the Callais case would be enough to functionally destroy Section 2.
If this does happen, Flugrath warned that "politicians who gerrymander to silence voters of color will have a new defense: Fixing racial discrimination is discrimination itself. It's an Orwellian logic that would make it nearly impossible to challenge unfair maps—not just in Congress but in state legislatures, city councils, and school boards across the country."
"The result would essentially be a return to the pre-1965 Jim Crow playbook, masked in pseudo-constitutional language," he continued. "If Section 2 falls, we could see an existential shift in power—a system in which representation reflects not the will of the people but the will of those in power. Congress would become insulated from accountability, its makeup preserved by maps drawn to protect incumbents."
With oral arguments beginning Wednesday, protesters assembled outside the Supreme Court, with signs bearing the image of the late civil rights icons John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer. Dr. Press Robinson, who has been part of the legal team arguing for fair maps in Louisiana since 2022, said this case is a battle to maintain the legal equality that those figures fought to secure.
"Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees that communities of color have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. It is one of the last remaining tools we have to protect against racial discrimination in voting and ensure that historically silenced voices are heard," Robinson said in an op-ed for the ACLU. "We need fair maps because they are the foundation of a representative democracy. Without them, entire communities are silenced because the game is rigged before it's even started."
