The Supreme Court seems poised to strike down race-based redistricting as unconstitutional, or at least rein in the practice, court experts told The Epoch Times.
The outcome of the high-profile racial gerrymandering case of Louisiana v. Callais could have an impact on the balance of power in the federal legislative branch. Gerrymandering is the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to favor a particular party or constituency.
Currently, Republicans maintain a razor-thin majority over Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The congressional seat at the heart of the litigation is currently held by Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.).
On Oct. 15, the high court will hear the case concerning whether a lower court-ordered creation of a second black-majority congressional district in Louisiana was constitutional.
The Supreme Court already heard the case on March 24 but declined to issue a ruling. Instead, it wanted parties to file more briefs on whether a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act itself—Section 2—violated two constitutional amendments.
Arguments in March focused on whether a version of Louisiana’s congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate based on race, color, or membership in a large language-minority group such as American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Native, or American Hispanic.
Courts have held that in certain circumstances, the 1965 Voting Rights Act permits states to take race into account when drawing electoral boundaries, but electoral maps drawn explicitly based on race are unconstitutional. The statute has been interpreted by the courts to forbid racial gerrymandering when it dilutes minority voting power.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court voted 5–4 to strike down Alabama’s electoral map for congressional elections in Allen v. Milligan, ruling that it was racially discriminatory and violated Section 2.
Alabama had defended its redrawn electoral map, arguing the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require the state to redraw districts to assure black representation in the state’s U.S. House delegation.
An Oct. 8 report published by two activist groups—Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund—suggests that if the Supreme Court invalidates Section 2, Republicans could gain as many as 19 seats in the House.
If Section 2 is invalidated, 25 to 30 percent of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and 11 percent of the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus could lose their seats, said the report.
District Court Ruling
Previously in the case, Judge Shelly Dick of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ruled that an earlier version of the state’s electoral map, which included only one black-majority congressional district, discriminated against black voters, who constitute nearly one-third of the state’s population.
The judge ordered the state to create a second black-majority district after finding that its failure to do so likely violated Section 2.
A group of non-black voters sued, arguing that the map with two black-majority districts discriminated against non-minorities by engaging “in explicit, racial segregation of voters.”
In April 2024, a divided panel of federal judges in the Western District of Louisiana agreed with the non-black voters that the electoral map with two black-majority districts was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that disfavored non-black voters.
After the Supreme Court declined to render a decision in June, the high court sharpened the focus of the case, directing the litigants to present arguments about whether creating a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments.
The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment forbids the federal government and the states from interfering with voting rights based on a citizen’s race.
The Supreme Court had voted in May 2024 to require Louisiana to use the disputed congressional map that created the second black-majority district in that year’s elections.
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry previously said in an application to the top court that not moving forward with the map so close to the 2024 elections would cause “chaos.”
However, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told The Epoch Times in August that her state has long argued that the Supreme Court’s “redistricting jurisprudence needs to be drastically changed or overruled.”
“By requiring state legislatures to draw maps that sort voters by race, it forces us to violate the federal Constitution,” she said at the time.
Murrill’s office filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Aug. 27.
“[Racial classifications] are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” the brief states, quoting a 1993 precedent.
Racial classifications related to the right to vote “are uniquely odious” because they “harm voters of all races whose skin colors determine their voting districts,” the brief added.
Press Robinson, a litigant in the companion case of Robinson v. Callais, filed a brief on Oct. 3, urging the Supreme Court not to strike down Section 2 nor the electoral map that created the second black-majority district. Both the map and Section 2 are still needed, the brief said.
When Louisiana redistricted, it complied with Section 2, which is a “permanent, nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting,” the brief said.
According to the brief, in the 1870s, the state prevented black people from holding office, and until the 1960s, it used literacy tests to “preserve white supremacy,” the brief said, quoting Louisiana v. United States, a Supreme Court ruling from 1965.
The United States only began to leave this period of “near-absolute racial exclusion after the [Voting Rights Act’s] enactment in 1965.”
Instead of deciding on the constitutionality of race-based redistricting, the Supreme Court should limit its ruling to the question of whether SB8, the state legislation that authorized the redistricting, is constitutional, the brief said.
Experts Weigh In
Jim Burling, vice president of legal affairs for the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the problem with drawing the second black-majority district is that it forces those drawing the lines “to take race into serious consideration” when doing so.
“The conflict here is that for years the Voting Rights Act has been interpreted to require race-conscious redistricting far more than race-neutral [redistricting],” Burling told The Epoch Times.
He added that the United States is supposed to be “a color-blind society,” yet the Voting Rights Act “says you must take race into account, at least the way it’s been interpreted.”
“It looks like the Supreme Court is going to determine whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, at least as it has been interpreted, is unconstitutional,” Burling said.
The justices appear to be growing “really tired of seeing the contortions that states are going through in order to comply with Section 2,” he added.
“There are fictions on top of fictions going on here, and I think the court may say, ‘enough of this charade.’”
Douglas Blair, director of communications for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said drawing an electoral map for racial purposes is “explicitly against the 15th Amendment.”
In this case, supporters of the map have said that the lines had to be drawn “based on racial purposes,” Blair told The Epoch Times.
“The Constitution is very clear—you cannot have racial motivation when you draw maps, but you can have partisan motivation when you draw maps.”
The current Supreme Court has shown it is willing to strike down precedent that doesn’t “hold up to scrutiny,” which suggests the justices will rule in favor of those challenging the electoral map, Blair said.
The foundation filed a brief on Sept. 23 in support of the challengers.
The 15th Amendment “invalidates the maps based on the [lower court’s] factual findings that the drawing of the map was racially motivated.” Such is map is “invalid under the Fifteenth Amendment, period,” the brief said.
The Supreme Court now has an opportunity to “complete the ‘unfinished work’ of the Fifteenth Amendment and end the allocation of power based on skin color,” 155 years after the amendment was enacted, the brief added.
Steven J. Allen, a senior fellow at the National Legal and Policy Center, said his guess is the Supreme Court will rule that race-based redistricting is unconstitutional, but the justices may write a narrow ruling that limits the decision’s effect.
Allen said race-based redistricting is unconstitutional because race is “a made-up category—it’s arbitrary.” Racial categories change over time, and the categories used in the United States today “aren’t even the categories we had 20 years ago,” he told The Epoch Times.
There may have been a time when an argument could be made that getting black people elected to Congress was so hard that districts needed to be drawn to give them a foothold in electoral politics, he said.
Today, however, “we’re moving into an era when a person’s skin color doesn’t matter in terms of being elected senator, governor, president, any office…you don’t have to do [redistricting] like you might have had to,” Allen said.
“Once you reach that stage, there is absolutely no justification for drawing a district in order to elect someone who looks a certain way.”
This article, labeled a Premium Report, by Matthew Vadum appeared Oct. 14, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Oct. 15, 2025.
Photo: illustration by The Epoch Times, public domain, Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times