The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding a pair of cases that could have a significant impact on the 2026 midterms, at a time when President Donald Trump is pressing Republican state legislatures to redesign their congressional district maps to give the GOP an edge in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 2022, Louisiana’s state legislature redrew its congressional district maps, leaving only one district with a majority of black voters, out of the state’s six districts, despite the fact that approximately one third of the state’s population is black. A lawsuit was filed and a federal court suggested, in a preliminary injunction, that the first Louisiana map likely violated the Voting Rights Act (VRA), specifically Section 2, which bars state and local governments from enacting any voting rule that “results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race or color.”

The Louisiana legislature subsequently drew another congressional district map with two majority-black districts in 2024. However, a group of non-black voters quickly filed a lawsuit, also citing race-based discrimination, arguing that the new map was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it was drawn specifically on the basis of race. Again, a federal court agreed and blocked the new map from being used. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court and the second court decision was temporarily put on hold, thus allowing the state to use the 2024 map, but no final decision was rendered.

Now, in the cases of Louisiana v. Phillip Callais and Press Robinson v. Phillip Callais, consolidated into one, the matter is once again before the Supreme Court. In a rare occurrence, the cases were reargued before the justices on Wednesday, with the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority seemingly poised to neuter Section 2 and reverse or dilute Supreme Court precedent concerning the VRA in order to preserve the protections afforded by the 14th Amendment.

Justice Clarence Thomas began the court’s questioning, asking president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Janai Nelson, arguing on behalf of the black voters, about the status of the first case brought before the courts. “I thought that was a preliminary injunction,” Thomas said, expressing skepticism over remaking a district map without the court adjudicating the matter and officially determining that racial discrimination had been at play. “But there was never a full merits determination.”

Justice Samuel Alito, often considered one of the court’s staunchest conservatives alongside Thomas, questioned the relationship between redistricting based on politics, which is legally permissible, and redistricting based on race, which is not. “If registered, Democrats overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates, regardless of the candidate’s race. Is that bloc voting?” he asked. Nelson answered that bloc voting is determined by demographic characteristics such as race or age, not party affiliation. “Likewise, if registered Republicans overwhelmingly vote for Republican candidates, that’s not bloc voting,” Alito observed. “So if it happens to be that people of one race or another race overwhelmingly prefer one of the political parties, does that transform the situation into racial voting? Or is it still just partisan voting?”

“That could be easily analyzed by statistics to see whether white Democrats vote for black Democratic candidates at a lower rate than they do for white Democratic candidates, whether white Republicans vote for black Republican candidates at a lower rate than they do for white candidates,” Alito posited. “It’s easy to isolate race from that to see whether there really is racially polarized voting as opposed to partisan polarized voting.”

Similarly, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, asked whether or not a federal court’s remedy to alleged race-based discrimination under a Section 2 complaint may itself employ race-based discrimination. “When it gets to the remedy side, do you think a plaintiff in a Section 2 case has to come up with a map where race isn’t the predominant factor in the map? Or is it okay for a federal court to use a map on the remedial side that intentionally discriminates on the basis of race?” he asked. “One argument is often, ‘Well, once you’ve found a Section 2 violation, you’ve got a compelling interest to go ahead and discriminate on the basis of race in your remedial map,” Gorsuch continued. “Sometimes federal district courts order maps, and you’re saying it’s sometimes acceptable for a federal district court to order a map that intentionally discriminates on the basis of race?”

Nelson argued that a federal court could not order a map that intentionally discriminates on the basis of race, but that states may remedy discrimination against a racial minority in districting maps by discriminating in favor of the racial minority and against the racial majority. “Federal district courts can only order maps that are constitutional,” she said. States have more “breathing room” in the matter than federal courts but “they don’t have breathing room to intentionally discriminate on the basis of race. They have breathing room to use race to remedy their own discrimination.”

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, both appointed to the court by Trump in his first term, raised concerns over the indefinite use of race-based remedies to political redistricting. Kavanaugh asked if “Section 2 plaintiffs cannot claim a lack of equal openness where politics, rather than race, is the likely reason for the state’s refusal to create a majority minority district?” Nelson responded, “That suggestion would swallow Section 2 whole. As I said, party cannot trump the responsibility of states to ensure that all voters have an equally open electoral process.” She continued, “The fact that black voters may correlate with voting Democrat or white voters may correlate with voting Republican does not deny the fact that there is racially polarized voting.”

“The issue, as you know, is that this court’s cases, in a variety of contexts, have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be indefinite and should have an endpoint,” Kavanaugh noted. “I don’t think it’s the statute. It’s the particular application of the statute that entails the intentional, deliberate use of race to sort people into different districts,” he asserted. “I think you might be saying there shouldn’t be a time limit unless Congress chooses one.”

Barrett suggested that, under the 14th and 15th Amendments, the remedy enacted by Congress — the VRA, in this case — must be proportionate to the issue being remedied, thus disqualifying indefinite race-based remedies as unconstitutional. “Congress has actually chosen the Voting Rights Act as a remedy. Does that affect the question of whether it can go on indefinitely or not, that at some point it becomes not congruent and proportional?” Barrett asked.

Later in the proceedings, Louisiana’s Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga argued firmly against race-based redistricting. “Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution. It requires striking enough members of the majority race to sufficiently diminish their voting strength, and it requires drawing in enough members of a minority race to sufficiently augment their voting strength,” he explained. “Embedded within these express targets are racial stereotypes that this court has long criticized. They assume, for example, that a black voter, simply because he is black, must think like other black voters, share the same interests and prefer the same political candidates. And this stereotyping system has no logical endpoint.”

“These problems … have placed states in impossible situations where the only sure demand is more racial discrimination for more decades,” Aguiñaga continued. “But I think if anything is clear in this court’s dedication to eliminating all racial discrimination, it is that the Constitution does not tolerate this system of government-mandated racial balancing.”

He urged the justices to revise the Supreme Court’s prior holding in Thornburg v. Gingles. In that case, a Section 2 complaint was brought against North Carolina over a new congressional district map, once again alleging unlawful racial discrimination. A district court held that even in the absence of any intention to discriminate based upon race, the new map was racially discriminatory in its “effect,” and was thus unconstitutional. In 1986, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, agreeing that the new map did not allow black voters “to participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice.”

The Gingles holding, Aguiñaga argued, is “expressly built on the sorts of racial stereotypes that the court’s cases say are impermissible under the Equal Protection Clause.” He continued, “And so I think that any test, whether it’s good or bad as a practical matter, that at the end of the day is asking the government to assign voters to different districts on the basis of their race and is engaged in stereotypes about how members of a race [vote], simply by virtue of their membership in that racial class. I think that’s a constitutional problem.”

Attorney Edward Greim also argued against upholding the new map. “In today’s America, voters … are still being racially stereotyped to place them into single member districts. If it was ever acceptable under our colorblind Constitution to do this, it was never intended to continue indefinitely,” he told the court. “It is time to reach a question this court has never reached, and hold that Section 2 alone is no compelling interest for racially gerrymandering citizens. … Today, the court should affirm and direct the district court to order a remedial map in time for the 2026 elections.”

The first time that the cases came before the Supreme Court, Thomas argued in favor of potentially striking down Section 2, noting “the intractable conflict between this Court’s interpretation of” Section 2 and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. “The Constitution is supreme over statutes … and no intervening developments will change that,” he affirmed. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts previously sided with the court’s three Democrat-appointed judges in 2023’s Allen v. Milligan, another redistricting case in which the court’s majority refused to strike down Section 2. However, in his concurring opinion in that case, Kavanaugh warned, as he did again in Wednesday’s oral arguments, that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

Section 2 arguments have frequently been used to halt Republican-led states’ redistricting plans, particularly in the South. If the court decides to weaken or strike down Section 2 or reverse its own precedents on the statute, analysts anticipate that Democrats could potentially lose half of their congressional seats in the South, going from 24 as of now to only 12 by the 2026 midterms. However, in order to effect next year’s elections, the court’s decision would have to be handed down within the next few months, to allow red states to enact their redistricted maps in time to meet voting law deadlines.