Supreme Court takes up GOP-led challenge to Voting Rights Act that could
affect control of Congress
[October 15, 2025]
By MARK SHERMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is taking up a major Republican-led
challenge to the Voting Rights Act, the centerpiece legislation of the
civil rights movement, that could gut a key provision of the law that
prohibits racial discrimination in redistricting.
The justices on Wednesday are hearing arguments for the second time in a
case over Louisiana's congressional map, which has two majority Black
districts. A ruling for the state could open the door for legislatures
to redraw congressional maps across the South, potentially boosting
Republican electoral prospects by eliminating majority Black and Latino
seats that tend to favor Democrats.
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 U.S. House of
Representatives.
The court's conservative majority has been skeptical of considerations
of race, most recently ending affirmative action in college admissions.
Twelve years ago, the court took a sledgehammer to another pillar of the
landmark voting law that required states with a history of racial
discrimination to get approval in advance from the Justice Department or
federal judges before making election-related changes.
The court has separately given state legislatures wide berth to
gerrymander for political purposes, subject only to review by state
supreme courts. If the court now weakens or strikes down the law's
section 2, states would not be bound by any limits in how they draw
electoral districts, a result that is expected to lead to extreme
gerrymandering by whichever party is in power at the state level.
Just two years ago, the court, by a 5-4 vote, affirmed a ruling that
found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over
Alabama’s congressional map. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice
Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal colleagues in the
outcome.
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President Lyndon Johnson, at podium, speaks in the rotunda of the
Capitol in Washington, before to signing the Voting Rights Act, Aug.
6, 1965. (AP Photo, File)
That decision led to new districts in both states that sent two more
Black Democrats to Congress.
Now, though, the court has asked the parties to answer a fundamental
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.”
In the first arguments in the Louisiana case in March, Roberts
sounded skeptical of the second majority-Black district, which last
year elected Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields. Roberts described the
district as a “snake” that stretches more than 200 miles to link
parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge
areas.
The court fight over Louisiana’s congressional districts has lasted
three years.
The state’s Republican-dominated legislature drew a new
congressional map in 2022 to account for population shifts reflected
in the 2020 census. But the changes effectively maintained the
status quo of five Republican-leaning majority white districts and
one Democratic-leaning majority Black district.
Civil rights advocates won a lower-court ruling that the districts
likely discriminated against Black voters.
The state eventually drew a new map to comply with the court ruling
and protect its influential Republican lawmakers, including Speaker
Mike Johnson. But white Louisiana voters claimed in their separate
lawsuit that race was the predominant factor driving it. A
three-judge court agreed, leading to the current high court case.
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