Will the Supreme Court Finally Ban Racial Preferences in Voting? Justices To Hear Challenge to Strangely Shaped Majority Black Congressional District
Edward Blum
October 9, 2025
When the Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina two years ago, it reaffirmed a fundamental legal principle: Every American must be treated as an individual rather than as a representative of a racial group.
That principle is as essential in the voting booth as it is in the classroom, and next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case—Louisiana v. Callais—that will give it the opportunity to extend it to the ballot box.
The case is a challenge, from "non-African American voters," to Louisiana's strangely shaped Sixth Congressional District.It was created in 2022 to ensure two of the state's six districts are majority-black, a proportion that mirrors the racial makeup of the state, which is 30 percent black.
The case illustrates how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,which outlawed racial discrimination in voting, has been transformed over the years from a shield against racial discrimination into a sword that compels racial gerrymandering. Critics portray the lawsuit as an attack on a "crowning achievement of the civil rights movement," but it is a necessary return to the original principles of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution.
The Voting Rights Act abolished literacy tests, poll taxes, and other barriers that disenfranchised black citizens. By the late 1970s, those obstacles were practically gone. Black voter registration and turnout soared, equaling or surpassing white turnout across most of the South.
But Section 2 was dramatically transformed in 1982 when Congress amended it to eliminate the requirement of proving intentional discrimination, replacing it with a "results test." Courts interpreted this to mean that if minority-preferred candidates did not win seats in proportion to minority population percentages, minority votes were likely being "diluted." Legislative bodies are now compelled to create as many majority-minority election districts as possible in order to mirror the percentage of black and Hispanic residents in a state, county, or city.
In Fayette County, Tenn., for example, the NAACP sued earlier this year because a quarter of the population is black, but no county commissioner was. The court’s "remedy" was to carve out three majority-black districts—not because black citizens were prevented from participating, but because election outcomes did not align with the county’s racial demographics.
Louisiana’s congressional redistricting is emblematic of this kind of outcome. Under its 2022 map, one of its six congressional districts was majority-black, even though one-third of the state’s population is black. A three-judge federal court declared this unlawful and ordered the creation of a second majority-black district. The legislature complied by drawing a 250-mile long, bug-splat district from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, slicing apart multiracial neighborhoods to harvest black voters.
Soon after this redrawing, another group of voters, describing themselves as "non-African American," sued, arguing the newly created district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A different three-judge panel agreed. Thus, one court ordered Louisiana to sort voters by race, while another condemned the state for doing so. Louisiana officials were left damned if they did, damned if they didn’t. This is not a quirk of Louisiana politics or geography. It is the inevitable result of Section 2’s application and legal distortion.
Defenders of the reinterpreted Section 2 portray it as a necessary guardrail against discrimination and backsliding. But it is extremely rare for minorities to be denied the right to vote or face unique hurdles.
Many defenders of these racial districts criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’s observation in Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 case that effectively ended the "preclearance" provision of the Voting Rights Act in which Roberts wrote that "things have changed dramatically in the South."
Indeed, they have: Black and Hispanic voters now register and turn out to vote at rates comparable to whites. Black Americans serve as presidents, vice presidents, governors, senators, representatives, mayors, and commissioners nationwide. Integrated neighborhoods and multiracial coalitions are commonplace. To pretend we remain in 1965 is to deny six decades of progress.
The SC will have to take this up, it’s the most biased and racist decision they ever made
https://freebeacon.com/courts/will-the-supreme-court-finally-ban-racial-preferences-in-voting-justices-to-hear-challenge-to-strangely-shaped-majority-black-congressional-district
Senator Connelly will be out of job because he can’t cheat in all elections, if he’s still alive