The Supreme Court Case That Could Eviscerate Minority Political Power And Lock In One-Party Rule

The Voting Rights Act and its protections for minority voters to elect candidates of their choosing hang in the balance as the court hears arguments in Louisiana v. Callais for the second time in 2025 on Wednesday.

If the court’s conservative supermajority finds that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional — or otherwise guts it in a manner that makes it all but useless — they will crush minority political power, particularly Black political power, across the country and help Trump secure far more Republican House seats than he could dream of in his mid-decade redistricting push.

“This is opening a whole new front from Republicans’ point of view, where they can dilute Black political power and achieve an unbelievable power grab,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, a liberal voting rights nonprofit.

The case initially came before the court after a map drawn by the Louisiana state legislature — on the orders of a lower court to create a second Black-majority district in compliance with the Voting Rights Act — was challenged by a group of white Louisianans who claimed it discriminated against them.

Instead of ruling on the case, the court called for reargument over a new question: whether or not Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans electoral practices that lead to “a denial or abridgment of the right ... to vote” and that leave minority voters with “less opportunity ... to participate in the political processes and to elect representatives of their choice,” violates the 14th and 15th amendments by allowing the consideration of race in redistricting.

President Donald Trump wants Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to cripple minority political power and hand Republicans at most 19 more House seats.

Chip Somodevilla via Associated Press

When the case first came to the court, Louisiana sided with the original Black Louisianans who brought the challenge to force the creation of the second Black majority district, arguing that the map should be upheld. But now the state has flipped. It argues that Section 2 should be struck down as unconstitutional. And for the first time ever, the Department of Justice joined the case to argue against the Voting Rights Act.

If the law is struck down, it would hand Southern states a newfound ability to eliminate Black and Latino opportunity districts currently protected by the Voting Rights Act. Southern states with at least one majority-minority district could claim that the court’s ruling mandates they initiate a mid-decade redistricting to eliminate these districts now deemed unconstitutional. That could lead to the elimination of up to 19 seats currently held by Democrats, as most majority Black and Latino districts vote for Democratic candidates, according to a new study by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter. If non-Southern states follow Trump’s orders and also redraw district lines, the total number of seats switching hands could total 27.

“We could see an instance where, by November, we have a decision from this court and you see legislatures all across the South calling special sessions like the ones called this summer with new maps even more aggressive than the one we saw them draw in Texas,” said April England-Albright, national legal director for Black Voters Matter.

The court would need to issue a decision in 2025 if state legislatures hope to redistrict ahead of ballot deadlines for candidates in 2026, which would give Republicans a chance to turn a political map that favors Democrats in the midterm election to one where the GOP could easily hold on to power and block efforts to hold Trump accountable before he leaves office.

If a decision came in 2026, it would likely be too late for states to redraw their congressional maps, although they would be able to do so ahead of the 2028 elections.

This would inaugurate a “new Solid South,” Groh-Wargo said, akin to the Solid South of the Jim Crow era, where Black voters were locked out of elections and white voters all supported one political party. It would also increase the Republican House majority from a mere five members to 24, making any effort by Democrats to retake the chamber much more difficult.

In doing this, the court could accomplish two major goals of the Trump administration: maintaining power by manipulating election laws to ensure Republicans remain in power and resegregating American society by rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

Indeed, the arguments made by Louisiana and the white Louisianans in their briefs reflect this when they cite the court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard that ended affirmative action in colleges and universities. They argue that the same race-blind rule must apply to elections as it does to college admissions. That decision is now being weaponized by the Trump administration to force colleges and universities to admit fewer Black students.

Republicans also see the creation of a multiracial democracy through the empowerment of minority voters and Black voters, in particular, as a threat to the stability of the country and to their hold on power, as most non-white voters and nearly all Black voters vote for Democrats.

“For minority voters, this is a very scary moment, but I do think that there are greater implications beyond what it says for minority folks,” England-Albright said. “There is a great potential that this country becomes ruled by one party.”

It is more likely than not that the court will gut Section 2. No new facts were uncovered in the first arguments in the case that would lead the court to hear rearguments on whether or not Section 2 is unconstitutional. The facts in Louisiana v. Callais are almost identical to the 2022 case of Allen v. Milligan, where the court ruled 5-4 that Section 2 demanded Alabama draw a second Black-majority district.

But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the majority in that case, wrote a concurrence arguing that, “The authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” He noted that this “temporal” argument was not raised and so he would not rule on it — yet.

During the first round of arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, Kavanaugh appeared fixated on the temporal argument. Now that the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act is before the court, he can flip and join the other four conservatives to end its application to redistricting.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in Allen v. Milligan, could also flip. As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts led the opposition to the 1982 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act which required courts to consider whether district maps had racially discriminatory outcomes and were not just the product of intentional racial discrimination. This change freed courts to require the drawing of minority opportunity districts more easily and spurred the creation of every Black-majority seat in the South, including the seat in Louisiana now before the court.

Roberts also wrote the majority opinion in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case, which freed states with a history of discrimination from having to preclear voting and district changes with the Department of Justice for racially discriminatory practices. His decision in that case relied on the same temporal argument that Kavanaugh now raises in Louisiana v. Callais.

“I don’t know how a narrow opinion comes from this,” said Wilfred Codrington III, a constitutional law professor at Cardozo School of Law, predicting the court would issue a ruling with far-reaching consequences.

Even the seemingly narrower path offered by the Department of Justice in its brief to the court would effectively nullify Section 2. While not calling for striking down Section 2 entirely as Louisiana and the white Louisianans do, Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s brief calls for the court make it harder for minority groups to bring a Section 2 case by requiring courts to preserve the partisan balance of existing maps — basically mandating even a majority-Black seat somehow be drawn to elect a Republican — while gutting the 1982 amendment’s extension of the law to cover racially discriminatory effects. This amounts to “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” according to Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos.

The Voting Rights Act was passed following the famous Selma to Montgomery March in Alabama, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. It enabled the growth of Black political power across the South after the fall of Jim Crow.

Samuel Corum via Getty Images

“To a large extent, this would make the test quite difficult to actually apply or it would basically nullify the whole Section 2 as amended test and return us to a pre-1982 amendment place,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

This would devastate Black representation in Congress and also in state legislatures, city councils and other local governmental bodies across the South and around the country. Considering that Black voters almost universally elect Democrats, this would have an intense partisan effect and create a Republican supermajority, or universal control across huge swathes of the country, similar to the regime Democrats, then the party of the South, created through Jim Crow.

In many ways, this harkens back to one of the darkest chapters in American history. After the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, the Supreme Court went about gutting their intent in a series of cases that led to the evisceration of civil rights and political power for Black people across the South and the imposition of Jim Crow. The language of those 19th-century cases is reflected in the arguments made today in Louisiana v. Callais, as the National Conference of Black Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild argue in a brief in the case.

Their brief compares an argument made by white Louisianans against the creation of the second Black-majority seat to the majority decision in the infamous Civil Rights Cases of 1883. This decision found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, as the 14th Amendment did not enable the federal government to prohibit private racial discrimination.

“As the record reveals, Section 2 is abused to set racial quotas and elevate some groups over others,” the white Louisianans argued in a brief earlier in 2025.

“When a man has emerged from slavery and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off inseparable commitments of that state, there must be some stage in the process of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws,” Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in the Civil Rights Cases decision.

This “sentiment” that “Black people in America have come far enough,” is identical, the brief argues.

Its effects would be the same, as well. Where the Civil Rights Cases and others, including the separate-but-equal decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, led to the imposition of Jim Crow authoritarianism and the elimination of all Black representation from the South, so too would gutting Section 2 lead to an all-out assault on Black representation today. It would roll back what is today the most diverse Congress in the country’s history. And, in doing so, the court would hand Republicans up to 19 House seats to pad their majority and protect Trump from ever facing oversight and accountability.

“The question I’m seeing before us is, are we going to have a multiracial democracy?” Codrington said. “We have a multiracial country. Are we just going to be a multiracial country or are we also going to live in a country where we think racial minorities will have some power and not be persistent political minorities?”