Supreme Court takes up GOP-led challenge to Voting Rights Act that could affect control of Congress

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.

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.