On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial gerrymandering in federal and state elections, and disenfranchised minority voters throughout the country.  In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged, claiming it to be unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. 

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, in which he stated that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race,” and identified the question before the court to be “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.” Here, Justice Alito was talking about discrimination against white voters.  His view, and the view of five other Justices on the Court, is that attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory – against white people. 

The lawsuit arose out of the state of Louisiana’s efforts to adopt a new congressional map following the 2020 census.  When they adopted a new map in 2022, it contained one majority-Black district out of the six total districts in the state, notwithstanding that Black voters make up one third of Louisiana’s population.  A group of Black voters brought a lawsuit alleging that the new map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in voting.  They won this lawsuit, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the state to draw up a new map by January 2024.   The State’s new map created an additional majority-Black district, leading to the election of Cleo Fields, a Black Democratic candidate who had previously represented a majority-Black district in the 1990s.  In response, a lawsuit was filed by a group of “non-African American voters” who claimed the new 2024 map violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by sorting voters based on race. The Supreme Court took up the case in 2025. 

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