Supreme Court takes up Republican attack on Voting Rights Act in case
over Black representation
[October 13, 2025]
By MARK SHERMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican attack on a core provision of the Voting
Rights Act that is designed to protect racial minorities comes to the
Supreme Court this week, more than a decade after the justices knocked
out another pillar of the 60-year-old law.
In arguments Wednesday, lawyers for Louisiana and the Trump
administration will try to persuade the justices to wipe away the
state's second majority Black congressional district and make it much
harder, if not impossible, to take account of race in redistricting.
“Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our
Constitution,” Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill wrote in the
state's Supreme Court filing.
A mid-decade battle over congressional redistricting already is playing
out across the nation, after President Donald Trump began urging Texas
and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines to make it
easier for the GOP to hold its narrow majority in the House of
Representatives. A ruling for Louisiana could intensify that effort and
spill over to state legislative and local districts.
The conservative-dominated court, which just two years ago ended
affirmative action in college admissions, could be receptive. At the
center of the legal fight is Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long
had the landmark civil rights law in his sights, from his time as a
young lawyer in the Reagan-era Justice Department to his current job.
“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Roberts wrote in
a dissenting opinion in 2006 in his first major voting rights case as
chief justice.
In 2013, Roberts wrote for the majority in gutting the landmark law's
requirement that states and local governments with a history of
discrimination, mostly in the South, get approval before making any
election-related changes.
“Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting
is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to
remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” Roberts wrote.
The challenged provision relies on current conditions
Challenges under the provision known as Section 2 of the voting rights
law must be able to show current racially polarized voting and an
inability of minority populations to elect candidates of their choosing,
among other factors.
“Race is still very much a factor in current voting patterns in the
state of Louisiana. It’s true in many places in the country,” said Sarah
Brannon, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting
Rights Project.
The Louisiana case got to this point only after Black voters and civil
rights groups sued and won lower court rulings striking down the first
congressional map drawn by the state's GOP-controlled Legislature after
the 2020 census. That map created just one Black majority district among
six House seats in a state that is one-third Black.
Louisiana appealed to the Supreme Court but eventually added a second
majority Black district after the justices' 5-4 ruling in 2023 that
found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over
Alabama’s congressional map.
Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal
colleagues in the Alabama outcome. Roberts rejected what he described as
“Alabama’s attempt to remake our section 2 jurisprudence anew.”
That might have settled things, but a group of white voters complained
that race, not politics, was the predominant factor driving the new
Louisiana map. A three-judge court agreed, leading to the current high
court case.
Instead of deciding the case in June, the justices asked the parties to
answer a potentially big question: “Whether the state’s intentional
creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates
the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.”
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Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts speaks during
lecture to the Georgetown Law School graduating class of 2025, in
Washington, May 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
Those amendments, adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War, were
intended to bring about political equality for Black Americans and
gave Congress the authority to take all necessary steps. Nearly a
century later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, called
the crown jewel of the civil rights era, to finally put an end to
persistent efforts to prevent Black people from voting in the former
states of the Confederacy.
A second round of arguments is rare at the Supreme Court
The call for new arguments sometimes presages a major change by the
high court. The Citizens United decision in 2010 that led to
dramatic increases in independent spending in U.S. elections came
after it was argued a second time.
“It does feel to me a little bit like Citizens United in that, if
you recall the way Citizens United unfolded, it was initially a
narrow First Amendment challenge,” said Donald Verrilli, who served
as the Obama administration's top Supreme Court lawyer and defended
the voting rights law in the 2013 case.
Among the possible outcomes in the Louisiana case, Verrilli said, is
one in which a majority holds that the need for courts to step into
redistricting cases, absent intentional discrimination, has
essentially expired. Kavanaugh raised the issue briefly two years
ago.
The Supreme Court has separately washed its hands of partisan
gerrymandering claims, in a 2019 opinion that also was written by
Roberts. Restricting or eliminating most claims of racial
discrimination in federal courts would give state legislatures wide
latitude to draw districts, subject only to state constitutional
limits.
A shift of just one vote from the Alabama case would flip the
outcome.
With the call for new arguments, Louisiana changed its position and
is no longer defending its map.
The Trump administration joined on Louisiana's side. The Justice
Department had previously defended the voting rights law under
administrations of both major political parties.
Rep. Cleo Fields has been here before
For four years in the 1990s, Louisiana had a second Black majority
district until courts struck it down because it relied too heavily
on race. Fields, then a rising star in the state’s Democratic
politics, twice won election. He didn’t run again when a new map was
put in place and reverted to just one majority Black district in the
state.
Fields is one of the two Black Democrats who won election to
Congress last year in newly drawn districts in Alabama and
Louisiana.
He again represents the challenged district, described in March by
Roberts as “a snake that runs from one end of the state to the
other,” picking up Black residents along the way.
If that's so, civil rights lawyer Stuart Naifeh told Roberts, it's
because of slavery, Jim Crow laws and the persistent lack of
economic opportunity for Black Louisianans.
Fields said the court's earlier ruling that eliminated federal
review of potentially discriminatory voting laws has left few
options to protect racial minorities, making the preservation of
Section 2 all the more important.
They would never win election to Congress, he said, “but for the
Voting Rights Act and but for creating majority minority districts.”
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Associated Press writer Gary Fields contributed to this report.
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