Decision was 6-3.
Those who didn’t vote right in 2016 – this is what you brought us.

JIM CROW 2.0
JIM CROW 2.0

VoteHub
@VoteHub
LANDMARK DECISION — The Supreme Court has narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act with their decision in Louisiana v. Callais, opening the door to sweeping redistricting changes across the South that could erase up to 10 majority-Black seats and flip them from blue to red.
9:12 AM · Apr 29, 2026

From Reuters:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday undermined a key provision of the Voting Rights Act – raising the bar for racial minorities to challenge electoral maps as racially discriminatory under the landmark civil rights law – in a victory for Louisiana Republicans and ​President Donald Trump’s administration.

The justices, in a 6-3 ruling powered by the court’s conservative members, upheld a lower court’s decision blocking an electoral map that had given the state a second Black-majority congressional district.

The ‌lower court had found that the map was guided too much by racial considerations in violation of the constitutional promise of equal protection under the law.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The ruling was authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by his five fellow conservative justices. The three liberal justices dissented.

The Louisiana case involved a central element of the Voting Rights Act. The law’s Section 2 was enacted by Congress to prohibit electoral maps that would result in diluting the clout of minority voters, even without direct proof of racist intent.
Alito wrote that the ​focus of Section 2 must now be to enforce the Constitution’s prohibition on intentional racial discrimination under the 15th Amendment.

“Only when understood this way does (Section 2) of the Voting Rights Act properly fit within Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment ​enforcement power,” Alito wrote.

Interpreting Section 2 to “outlaw a map solely because it fails to provide a sufficient number of majority-minority districts would create a right that the Amendment does ⁠not protect,” Alito added.

Legal analysts said before the ruling was issued that a decision undercutting Section 2 could benefit Republican candidates.

From The Talking Points Memo:

How the SCOTUS VRA Decision Could Impact the Midterms and Beyond
by Khaya Himmelman
04.29.26 | 11:55 am

In a major blow to the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision in a case known as Louisiana v. Callais, struck down Louisiana’s second Black-majority congressional district, ruling that the map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The decision does not strike down the Voting rights Act altogether, but will limit the use of consideration of race in future maps, and, as experts explained to TPM, will impact the fate of the Trump administration’s broader gerrymandering blitz.

“It is hard to overstate what an earthquake this will be for American politics,” legal scholar and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen wrote in a post for Election Law Blog.

Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, called Wednesday’s decision a “devastating setback in the long fight for equality in political representation for all Americans.”

The case began in 2022 after a group of Black voters sued the state, arguing that a new post-2020 census map diluted the vote of the district’s Black voters and violated Section 2 of the VRA. In response, a federal court asked the Louisiana legislature to adopt a new congressional map with two Black-majority districts.

In another federal lawsuit, a group of white voters then challenged this new 2024 map, arguing that the map was unconstitutional and a racial gerrymander in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. A panel of judges ruled in favor of the white voters, causing plaintiffs from the earlier case to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

As explained in a report from Issue One, this decision could impact maps in several states and throw a wrench in the overall impact of Trump’s until-now floundering redistricting war. Georgia, Missouri, and Florida, for example, might now hypothetically redraw maps, eliminating or changing majority-Black districts, and potentially flipping Democratic seats to the GOP.

Some Republicans are already jumping on this decision as an opportunity to call for new maps for the midterm elections.

“I urge our state legislature to reconvene to redistrict another Republican seat in Memphis. It’s essential to cement @realDonaldTrump’s agenda and the Golden Age of America,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), wrote in a post on X. “I’ve vowed to keep Tennessee a red state, and as Governor, I’ll do everything I can to make this map a reality.”

Kyle Kondik, managing editor for the University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told TPM that this decision means that the redistricting battle of 2025 and 2026 will continue into the next cycle, and may force some states to redraw their maps.

philip lewis
@Phil_Lewis_
NAACP President Derrick Johnson statement on SCOTUS’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling:

KennyMack1971
‪@kennymack1971.bsky.social‬
This is why as far as I’m concerned leftists across the board but particularly White leftists can get fucked and stay fucked. They’ve been treating our rights like a game for years and now here we are.

This is why as far as I’m concerned leftists across the board but particularly White leftists can get fucked and stay fucked. They’ve been treating our rights like a game for years and now here we are.

— KennyMack1971 (@kennymack1971.bsky.social) 2026-04-29T15:33:01.668Z

MsKitty
‪@michelec64.bsky.social‬
That’s what particularly breaks my heart. All the elders still here who fought, marched, and risked their lives, knowing that they’re gonna leave this world with all the work they did completely undone.
10:57 AM · Apr 29, 2026
https://bsky.app/profile/michelec64.bsky.social/post/3mknho4fxes2r

From Democracy Docket:

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(1/5) 🚨BREAKING: SCOTUS guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by making it harder to challenge racially discriminatory maps. Today’s decision will threaten Black and brown political representation for generations in Southern states. Full story to come.

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(2/5) THE IMPACT:

Today’s ruling could:

✅Help secure 27 more red seats in Congress
✅Cement GOP House control for at least a generation
✅Rewrite redistricting rules for state legislatures, city councils and school boards

Without racial protections, maps could be redrawn with almost no limits.
9:12 AM · Apr 29, 2026

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(3/5) WHAT’S NEXT:
The case will return to lower courts for more proceedings, and the ~20 lawsuits on hold pending a decision in Callais will likely move forward.

Florida — the only state left in the ongoing redistricting war — could benefit from today’s decision before the 2026 election.
9:12 AM · Apr 29, 2026

Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
(4/5) HOW DID WE GET HERE:

The court first heard the case last March when it questioned whether LA violated the constitution by drawing a map to comply with the VRA.

But it scheduled a rare rehearing in October on the question of whether Section 2 of the VRA violates the 14th or 15th Amendment.
https://x.com/DemocracyDocket/status/2049491958565847198?s=20

Nefarious Means
‪@nefariousmeans.bsky.social‬

Follow
Today has been a reminder that Black people have no allies. Brown people voting for Trump. White “allies” who repeatedly throw us to the wolves then demand our labor and support.

2024 was the final betrayal.
https://bsky.app/profile/nefariousmeans.bsky.social/post/3mknh6rq4fc2t

The Voting Rights Act is essentially dead and it’s quite possible that we will, like when a similar SCOTUS gutted civil rights at the fall of Reconstruction, see a disappearance of much of the Black congressional representation, especially in the most heavily Black states, which are in the South.— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones.bsky.social) Apr 29, 2026 at 11:04 AM

Ida Bae Wells
‪@nhannahjones.bsky.social‬
We must understand the racist political rhetoric, the erasure and attacks on Black history, the reinstalling of Confederate names and monuments, all go hand-in-hand as the Court and Congress legitimize the taking of political rights and the end of multiracial democracy itself.
10:06 AM · Apr 29, 2026

Ida Bae Wells
‪@nhannahjones.bsky.social‬
Folks will try to parse language around this, using words such as “limits” the VRA or “diminishes” the VRA, but the acts most potent tools for ensuring Black representation or that Black people can pick their representation have been eliminated.
10:07 AM · Apr 29, 2026

Ida Bae Wells
‪@nhannahjones.bsky.social‬
And to be clear, in case it’s not, democracy cannot and will not exist without these protections. We already see a South so heavily gerrymandered that numerical majorities cannot win elections and where a minority holds supermajorities in state legislatures.
10:09 AM · Apr 29, 2026

Ida Bae Wells
‪@nhannahjones.bsky.social‬
There are people still living who fought — and watched their compatriots be murdered — for the passage of this act and to attempt to democratize America. To see it completed felled in the span of their OWN lifetime is just absolutely devastating.
10:11 AM · Apr 29, 2026

Ida Bae Wells
‪@nhannahjones.bsky.social‬
I say it again and again: Because we don’t learn the real history of this country, we do not understand what this country is capable of. After 1870, 22 Black men served in Congress. By 1901, because of racist SCOTUS rulings, electoral coups and election cheating and violence, there were none.
10:27 AM · Apr 29, 2026

Ida Bae Wells
‪@nhannahjones.bsky.social‬
I encourage you to read the 1901 final Congressional speech of George Henry White, who would be the last Black man in Congress for 30 yrs.This “is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but…phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again… blackpast.org/african-amer…

Ida Bae Wells
‪@nhannahjones.bsky.social‬
None of us take pleasure in being right: But we are in the Second Nadir.

http://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/m…

None of us take pleasure in being right: But we are in the Second Nadir.www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/m…

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones.bsky.social) 2026-04-29T16:13:25.911Z

jamelle

‪@jamellebouie.net‬
The court has simply recreated the pre-Brown world in allowing racial discrimination across a broad number fields as long as it is “facially neutral,” gutting the Reconstruction Amendments in the process.
12:39 PM · Apr 29, 2026