The Congressional Black Caucus on Tuesday urged American corporations to condemn efforts to dilute Black voting strength, as Southern states eliminate congressional districts where most residents are Black.

The CBC’s attempt to mobilize the business community comes as Black representation in Congress potentially faces its most severe threat since the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War. But some business leaders have taken a friendlier tone with President Donald Trump, who backs the gerrymandering.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in April, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, sharply weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, which had blocked states from breaking apart majority-minority districts. It limited the use of race in redistricting, prompting several Southern states to advance new maps targeting these districts, which are mostly held by Black Democrats.

“These actions are not routine political exercises,” the letter reads. “They are coordinated efforts to silence Black voices at the ballot box and strip communities of representation in American democracy.”

The message is addressed to more than 200 corporations and business groups that signed on to a 2021 letter in support of voting rights, as well as an unnamed number of other corporate leaders. Among the signatories were Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Nike, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Target, Tesla and Unilever USA. 

That letter called on Congress to update the Voting Rights Act, including changes that would restore the federal government’s ability to review changes to election and voting laws in states and local governments with a history of discrimination, a practice called preclearance that the Supreme Court effectively halted in 2013.

On Tuesday, the CBC said those companies should issue individual or joint public statements opposing efforts to dilute Black voting strength and dismantle protections in the Voting Rights Act.

The lawmakers also want companies to report on corporate political spending and relationships connected to attacks on voting rights and “discriminatory redistricting schemes.” Companies should accept an invitation to participate in a national gathering alongside civil rights leaders and advocates to discuss voting rights and Black political power, the lawmakers wrote.

The letter asks businesses to respond by June 9.

“Five years ago, corporations across America publicly affirmed that democracy, racial equity, and voting rights matter. Today, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, those commitments are being tested in real time,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat who chairs the CBC, said in a statement. 

“Corporations that have profited from Black consumers, relied on Black workers, and benefited from Black communities cannot remain silent while Black political representation is dismantled in plain sight,” Clarke said. “Silence in this moment is not neutrality — it is complicity.”

Corporate leaders warm to Trump

But political attitudes in parts of corporate America, especially among tech firms, have shifted since 2021.

When businesses signed the July 2021 letter, they were acting after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. Six years later, some titans of American business have taken a more conciliatory approach to Trump and the Make America Great Again movement.

Elon Musk, who leads Tesla, spearheaded the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, initiative in 2025 that resulted in the firings and layoffs of thousands of federal workers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has spoken positively about the president. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, called Trump “more mature” in his second term.

Trump has also led a push against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In March, the president signed an executive order targeting DEI practices by federal contractors. The directive followed another anti-DEI order in January 2025 that encouraged the private sector to “end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.”

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais, some Republicans have portrayed eliminating majority-minority districts as a constitutional imperative. The current districts should be tossed because they were drawn with their racial makeup in mind, they say.

“I don’t think race should be used to help a person because of his race, and I don’t think race should be used to harm a person because of his or her race,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiania Republican, said at a Senate hearing on racial gerrymandering last week.

Rapid remaps

Since the release of the Callais decision on April 29, Florida and Tennessee have changed their maps and Louisiana is expected to follow soon. South Carolina lawmakers tried but failed to advance a new map and Alabama has taken steps to implement a 2023 gerrymander after the Supreme Court lifted a lower court order that had blocked it.

A panel of three federal judges on Tuesday issued a new order halting the Alabama map, which would likely force out one of the state’s two Black Democratic members of Congress if enacted. The judges found that the map was racially discriminatory, even in light of Callais. 

Alabama has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

“I applaud the three-judge panel for upholding the rule of law and reaffirming that racial discrimination has no place in our redistricting process,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat who also signed Tuesday’s CBC letter, said in a statement.

“While we know that this legal battle is far from over, today’s ruling sends a clear message: Black voters in Alabama cannot and will not be silenced.”

U.S. House Republicans on Thursday denounced expanding the Supreme Court, an idea some Democrats support to dilute the court’s conservative majority after years of decisions that have angered liberals.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers at a hearing clashed over the future of the high court following Louisiana v. Callais, a landmark decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act. 

The ruling cleared the way for GOP-controlled Southern states to eliminate congressional districts held by Black Democrats ahead of the November midterm elections.

Democrats have responded by renewing calls for changing the Supreme Court, including expanding the number of justices beyond the nine currently serving. Thursday’s hearing offered a preview of how Republicans may attack those plans if Democrats retake the House in November and try to advance a court overhaul through the chamber.

“Will the United States Congress side with the idea that we should be more democratic in our third branch, or that our third branch should remain more independent, less if not completely outside” the will of the people at the moment, said Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet.

‘Court packing’

The subcommittee hearing, officially titled “Court Packing: A Threat to the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy,” centered on Republican warnings that adding justices would create a slippery slope with no clear end. Democrats countered that the court is placing democracy at risk.

It’s not clear a bill to expand the court would pass a Democratic-controlled House. No clear consensus exists among Democrats over exactly what changes should be made, and other ideas include term limits for justices, a mandatory ethics code for the court or limiting the kind of cases the court can take. 

Any overhaul would face a steep path to becoming law in the near term because of the Senate filibuster and President Donald Trump’s veto.

But Democrats are broadly furious with the Supreme Court and support is growing for some form of action. 

Former Vice President Kamala Harris last week called for a discussion of Supreme Court reform, including expanding the court. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat set to become speaker if his party retakes the chamber, has said “something” must be done in the next Congress.

“Our nation is now in Jim Crow 2.0,” Rep. Henry “Hank” Johnson, a Georgia Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said at the hearing.

Ruling that sparked outrage

In Callais, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana had enacted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander when it drew a second majority-Black congressional district. 

The opinion sharply limits the use of race in redistricting, allowing states for partisan gain to split apart districts where most residents belong to a racial minority group. The Voting Rights Act had previously protected these districts.

Democrats have been outraged by other major decisions as well. 

The Citizens United case in 2010 dramatically expanded the role of corporate money in politics. Dobbs in 2022 ended the federal right to abortion. And in 2024, Trump v. United States gave the president sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.

“We can either sit back as our Supreme Court continues to act without any restraint or checks and balances, or we can do something about it,” Johnson said.

Republicans say they’ve also lost

Republicans and witnesses called by GOP lawmakers emphasized that the Supreme Court has also ruled against conservatives in a number of high-profile cases. 

For example, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the decisive vote to uphold the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law. The Supreme Court also guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage in 2015 and bolstered employment protections for gay and transgender workers in 2019. 

More recently, the Supreme Court effectively blocked Trump’s deployments of the National Guard into Democratic cities. And in February, the justices struck down Trump’s global tariffs — his signature trade policy.

“We had a terrible tariff decision. They cost our country a fortune,” Trump said Thursday.

Gene Schaerr, a lawyer who has argued in front of the Supreme Court, suggested that if Democrats add justices, Republicans will almost certainly respond.

“Before long the only venue in Washington, D.C., that will be large enough to accommodate the Supreme Court’s conferences, their private conferences, will be the White House ballroom,” Schaerr told the subcommittee.

Merrick Garland nomination

But Republicans have already engaged in court packing, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. 

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Senate Republicans led by then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky blocked consideration of Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. After Trump won the 2016 election, the Senate moved swiftly to confirm his nominee, Neil Gorsuch, in early 2017.

Senate Republicans then quickly confirmed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 — despite the vacancy occurring much closer to the election than in 2016. Those decisions helped move a 5-4 court at the end of the Obama era to a 6-3 conservative majority.

“So right there we have two seats officially stolen by Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate,” Raskin said.

On Thursday, Republicans cast Democratic attacks on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy as dangerous. The court relies on respect, Missouri Solicitor General Louis Capozzi said, with the norm of an independent judiciary built over time.

“Today, we take it for granted that government officials will follow the Supreme Court’s orders,” said Capozzi, who previously clerked for Gorsuch. “But that could change if politicians interfere with the Supreme Court’s independence.”

WASHINGTON — About 100 rallygoers gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to hear from activists and members of Congress protesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down federal protections for the voting power of minorities.

The justices diluted a major part of the Voting Rights Act in their 6-3 decision on April 29 that declared Louisiana’s congressional map that created a second majority Black district an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

Kentravius Coleman, 27, of Alexandria, Louisiana, at a United for Democracy rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, May 20, 2026. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom) 

Speaking to the crowd Wednesday, Louisiana native and resident Kentravius Coleman said “we are not a powerless people.”

“Black people in Louisiana may feel defeated because on a random Wednesday we learned we’d have less reflective representation,” said Coleman, 27, who works as an administrative coordinator at the progressive organization United for Democracy, which hosted the rally.

“We need to demand accountability from all three branches of government. As the nation watches Louisiana, we need to focus on the aspect that there is no more business as usual,” Coleman, who lives in the state’s central city of Alexandria, added.

State legislatures across the South quickly began work to draw new congressional districts following the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said voters are “angry.”

“When you see respected, leading Black members of Congress who win, and have enjoyed the respect of their states, redistricted out of their office by political manipulation, that gets you mad,” Whitehouse said.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., at a rallly on Wednesday, May 20, 2026. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

“Whatever they may gain in redistricting mischief, let’s make sure that they lose where they can’t redistrict, like in Senate races … and governor’s races,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Analilia Mejia, D-N.J., said the country is at a “crossroads” and urged rallygoers to remember Civil Rights Movement leaders.

“Let’s be good ancestors for those who will come later, who will say in a moment in which a despotic authoritarian and his cowardly lackeys attempted to revert to, frankly, pre-Civil War or Jim Crow-era level of politics, that we stood up and we stood strong and we said, ‘Oh hell no,’” said Mejia.

Republicans on a U.S. Senate panel suggested Tuesday a recent Supreme Court decision weakening the federal Voting Rights Act invalidated U.S. House districts in Democratic states where most residents belong to a racial minority group. 

Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, signaled that Republicans will target majority-minority districts in blue states as they seek to maximize their opportunities to reshape the political map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. GOP-controlled Southern states are already rushing forward gerrymanders.

Schmitt urged the Department of Justice to crack down on states with maps drawn to protect majority-minority districts. A top DOJ official has suggested the agency supports scrutinizing the districts. The demand seems to extend the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision that limited states from using race to draw districts.

“These maps do not become constitutional because they’re already in use,” Schmitt said. “They do not survive because politicians call them voting rights maps. Yet, they will not disappear on their own. The Department of Justice has an obligation to act.”

The court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision gave states the OK to eliminate districts where most residents belong to racial minority groups in the pursuit of a partisan advantage. Alabama, Florida and Tennessee have advanced new maps, and Louisiana is expected to follow soon. South Carolina is debating its own gerrymander.

The new district lines, along with gerrymanders enacted before the Callais decision, could ultimately provide Republicans with a net gain of upwards of 10 seats.

The seats could prove critical as Republicans face political headwinds approaching the midterm elections amid sagging approval numbers for President Donald Trump. A successful legal campaign that forces Democratic states to break apart majority-minority districts could create additional competitive House races.

Breaking up Democratic districts

About one-third of all House districts drawn following the 2020 census were majority-minority, according to a Ballotpedia analysis — 148 in all. Democrats held 122 as of 2024. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote on social media on April 30 that the department continues to prioritize equal protection under the law, including in voting. Dhillon’s post came in response to a letter Schmitt sent to DOJ raising similar points to what he said on Tuesday.

“Senator — we are ON IT!” Dhillon wrote.

Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said the Supreme Court’s decision leaves many communities of color with few enforceable tools to fight unfair maps. He called on the Senate to act by passing a federal ban on mid-decade redistricting and partisan gerrymandering.

“Our democracy depends ultimately on protecting and preserving the right of individual citizens to pick their politicians, not intensifying the control that politicians have about who the voters are that they will permit to be involved in the election,” Welch said.

‘The definition of racism’

Some Republicans have begun to cast majority-minority districts as racist. The loaded rhetoric suggests eliminating these districts is not just politically useful but also a legal and moral imperative.

Missouri, where Republicans hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts, exemplifies the new reality under Callais. The Republican-controlled General Assembly approved a map in September that divides Kansas City in a bid to oust Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who has long represented the city core. 

State lawmakers left in place a St. Louis-area district held by Democratic Rep. Wesley Bell where fewer than half of residents are white. But some Missouri Republicans have called the district a racial gerrymander and want the General Assembly to split it apart, too.

“That’s the definition of racism, is drawing districts based on the color of one’s skin,” Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins told reporters last week. “We don’t want that in Missouri.”

The Supreme Court in the Callais decision did not formally strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race and other characteristics. In practice, however, it may be effectively impossible for gerrymandering opponents to prove discrimination, voting rights experts say.

“It begs the question whether or not lawmakers will have to say, ‘not only do I not like Black voters, but this is the reason why I’m drawing up this piece of legislation,’” Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of the nonpartisan voting rights group Fair Elections Center, said in an interview with States Newsroom days after the release of the Supreme Court opinion.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court cleared away a court order that had blocked Alabama from implementing a map passed by state lawmakers in 2023 that could hand Republicans another seat. A lower court had found the map violated Section 2.

In Louisiana, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state’s ongoing congressional primary election in anticipation of a new map that will likely eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. The Supreme Court fast-tracked paperwork in its Callais decision to clear the way for state lawmakers to act quickly.

Obligation to act

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Article III Project, a conservative legal group, said all states with maps drawn to protect minority representation have a “clear duty” to redraw them using race-neutral criteria. 

The calendar should be no obstacle, he argued, saying state legislatures can be called into special session and primary elections delayed until new maps are in place.

“The fact that we are well into the 2026 election cycle provides no blanket exemption from these constitutional obligations,” Chamberlain said.

Callais has unleashed chaos and already undercut fair representation for Black voters, Todd Cox, associate director-counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the subcommittee. But he argued the decision doesn’t call into question the constitutionality of majority-minority districts or other districts that give voters of color an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

Cox cautioned against using Callais to justify targeting majority-minority districts that provide that opportunity, saying it might indicate that states intentionally discriminated against minority voters.

WASHINGTON — The Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP on Tuesday urged pushback against GOP-led redistricting efforts in Southern states via college sports, including a boycott of public universities by athletes and supporters.

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and fellow Congressional Black Caucus members blasted a bill that sets forth a national framework for college athletes’ compensation. 

But the CBC’s backlash went beyond just the legislation — which was yanked from the House’s voting schedule this week following unanimous opposition from the major voting bloc. 

At a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, the lawmakers rallied behind the NAACP’s call earlier Tuesday for Black athletes and fans to withhold “athletic and financial support from public universities in states that have moved to limit, weaken, or erase Black voting representation” following the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

The decision from the nation’s highest court gutted the federal Voting Rights Act and has prompted a major redistricting push in Southern states that could threaten Black representation in Congress. 

Southeastern Conference targeted

“We are here standing in solidarity with the NAACP and its call for athletes to boycott institutions within the (Southeastern Conference) that belong to states that have unleashed these Jim Crow-like racially oppressive tactics, which is unacceptable, unconscionable and un-American,” Jeffries said. 

“We believe that the silence of these institutions is complicity, and we will not stand for it,” the New York Democrat added.

The SEC, a major athletic conference under the NCAA, includes several member universities located in states that have joined the redistricting wave. The NAACP pointed to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas as “eight priority states.”

“In this moment, our democracy is in crisis,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, at Tuesday’s press conference.

“This is not about partisanship — this is about true representation, and for the NAACP, we will fight with all we have in solidarity with the Congressional Black Caucus to ensure that we have representation, or if we don’t, we will withhold the talent that play on the football field or on the basketball court,” he said. 

SCORE Act under scrutiny 

The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements, or ‘‘SCORE” Act, seeks to allow compensation but bar student-athletes from being recognized as employees and provide broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college sports conferences. 

The college sports world continues to grapple with the fallout from the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines, which allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL. 

A federal judge in June 2025 also approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.

The college sports landscape is also grappling with gender inequity in NIL deals, a patchwork of state NIL laws, booster collectives and the NCAA’s controversial transfer portal, among other issues.

House GOP leadership had also pulled the SCORE Act from the House floor in December.

In a statement, the CBC said U.S. Reps. Shomari Figures, D-Ala., and Janelle Bynum, D-Ore., two of the bill’s lead sponsors, had been negotiating changes in the legislation to improve it but pulled their support, and the CBC did so as well.

The caucus said its members cannot support legislation that benefits large athletic institutions when their leaders are not speaking out about redistricting that weakens Black representation in government.

“This is not politics as usual. This is a defining moral moment for our country,” the caucus said.

“For generations, Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable industries in American life. The success, visibility, and cultural influence of major athletic conferences and institutions are inseparable from the talent, labor, leadership, and cultural contributions of Black communities. Yet at the very moment those same communities face coordinated attacks on their democratic representation, too many leaders across college athletics have chosen silence.”

Letters sent

The caucus also said it has sent formal letters to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Jim Phillips and NCAA President Charlie Baker “demanding immediate engagement and a public response regarding the ongoing assault on Black political representation throughout the South and across the nation.”

Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, said the caucus “cannot support legislation benefiting major athletic institutions that continue to remain silent while Black voting rights and Black political power are being systematically dismantled across the South.” 

Jeffries noted that “with respect to the SCORE Act, our position has been clear: If LSU is for it, we’re against it. If the University of Alabama is for it, we’re against it. If Ole Miss is for it, we’re against it. If the University of South Carolina is for it, we’re against it. If the University of Tennessee is for it, we’re against it, and if the SEC schools are for it, we are against it.” 

The Alabama Legislature on Friday passed two bills that would allow the state to set new primary elections in certain congressional and legislative district if federal courts allow the state to revert to maps it previously declared racially discriminatory.

The session came after the U.S. Supreme Court substantially weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, preventing racial discrimination in voting laws, in Louisiana v. Callais, and as the Alabama Attorney General’s Office sought to overturn prior court rulings that led to the creation of a second congressional district with a substantial population of Black voters.

Republicans said the efforts were meant to allow state officials to draw maps. Gov. Kay Ivey, who called the special session on May 1, said it would take mapping power from “activist groups who think they know Alabama better than Alabama.”

Democrats through the session said Republicans were trying to reduce Black political representation, won through the suffering and deaths of civil rights activists.

“My aunt bludgeoned on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tear gas, billy clubs, trampled over for the right to vote not a long time ago,” said Sen. Robert Stewart, D-Selma, during debate on Friday. “We didn’t even have the Voting Rights Act intact for 50 years. That is a sin and a shame.”

Protestors shadowed the session all week, from a Monday rally that drew at least 400 people to demonstrations in legislative committees on Thursday to a protest on Friday that led to the removal of one activist from the House galleries and drew Democratic state representatives attempting to intervene on her behalf.

Litigation over the new laws is likely if the federal courts reverse their previous rulings and allow the state to redistrict. Democrats throughout the week noted an amendment to the Alabama Constitution passed in 2022 forbids election law changes six months before an election. Republicans said the amendment did not apply to primaries.

Alabama Reflector staffers documented the session and took photos throughout the week.

Tensions erupted Friday as Republican state lawmakers presented new election maps to eliminate one or both of Louisiana’s majority-Black congressional districts.

Hundreds of people came to the State Capitol, filling several overflow rooms, to watch the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, which met to consider new U.S. House district boundaries and give the public a chance to comment. Lawmakers don’t plan to start voting on the maps until at least next week. 

Committee chairman Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, R-Port Allen, called the hearing after Gov. Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency and suspended Louisiana’s upcoming U.S. House primary elections April 30, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state’s existing congressional map was  an unconstitutional racial gerrymander against white voters. 

Within minutes of the meeting coming to order, Sen. Gary Carter Jr., D-New Orleans, began questioning Kleinpeter about how many absentee ballots had already been cast in the May 16 U.S. House primaries and whether the votes would be counted.  

“Can you give the public certainty that those ballots will not be discarded?” Carter asked.

Kleinpeter said Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry, no relation to the governor, was the appropriate official to answer his question, but she was not in attendance. 

Carter continued his questioning, asking Kleinpeter if he was personally concerned about the status of his own ballot. 

“Have you voted yet?” Carter asked.

“I don’t have to answer that,” Kleinpeter responded. 

Surprised by the rapid-fire questions from the generally soft-spoken Carter, Kleinpeter called for a recess, which eased tensions enough for the meeting to resume after several minutes. 

Kleinpeter told Carter he would make sure the secretary of state was made aware of his questions, and that she or someone from her office would attend the committee’s next meeting, which is scheduled for Wednesday.

Nancy Landry has declined to answer questions related to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, explaining that the case, Callais v. Louisiana, is still in litigation after being returned to the federal district court where it originated. There are also ongoing legal challenges to the governor’s order to postpone the U.S. House primaries.

The rest of Friday’s hearing saw tempers flare among senators and protesters, with chants of “shut it down” heard from attendees watching from the Senate committee hall corridor and adjacent overflow rooms.

The discussion grew particularly heated when state Sen. Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, presented his congressional map that eliminates both majority-Black U.S. House districts. Morris, who is white, said his proposed boundaries don’t prevent a Black candidate from winning one of the state’s six seats. 

“I didn’t draw it with the intention to draw it 6-0,” Morris said. “I left race out of it … It’s intended to comply with the Supreme Court in Callais.”

Carter began a fiery exchange with Morris about legislation the West Monroe senator sponsored this session to eliminate the Orleans Parish clerk of criminal court and eliminate several of its judgeships. Gov. Jeff Landry signed the clerk bill into law, preventing exonerated “prison lawyer” Calvin Duncan, who is now an actual attorney, from assuming office. Morris’ measure paring back the Orleans judges’ roster awaits House consideration.  

“Let’s look at the totality of your work,” Carter told Morris. “Your work has eliminated the elected seat of an African American in the city of New Orleans. Your work has eliminated the political power of numerous elected officials in the city of New Orleans.”

Morris said his legislation is meant only to consolidate Orleans Parish’s dual court systems for civil and criminal cases, the only one of its kind in the state.

Carter and Morris began speaking over each other, prompting Kleinpeter to call another recess, which cut off the microphones and the Capitol’s live video feed. 

“Put my microphone back on!” Carter yelled. “He’s suggesting he’s not racist. I suggest we look at his work.”

“You are out of line,” Kleinpeter said.

 

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The sergeants-at-arms intervened, trying to calm the room as Carter and Morris both stood up to leave. As Morris walked away, he turned to the spectators seated behind him, all against his proposals, and said, “Y’all need to shut up.” 

“I was frustrated when, as I was trying to answer questions from committee members, people in the audience directly behind me were continuing to comment and talk loudly enough so that it was hard for me to concentrate and answer questions,” Morris said in a statement issued after the hearing.  

As Carter and Morris both left the committee room for another recess, the crowd in the hallway  chanted “let him speak,” referring to Carter. Sergeants-at-arms stood guard on each side of the committee room’s two sets of double doors, refusing to let anyone enter or exit. 

@wesleysmuller Protestors try to barge into Senate hearing on congressional redistricting #livehighlights #tiktoklive ♬ original sound – Wes Muller

One protester, Mike McClanahan, the NAACP’s state conference president, managed to open the door and try to enter, but guards physically forced him back into the hall and shut the doors.

McClanahan was eventually allowed into the room once the commotion had settled down. In a later interview, he said he just wanted to see what was going on because the live feed was cut off.

“This is the people’s house,” McClanahan said. “We have the right to hear every single thing, especially while the session’s going on in our house. So I was just trying to tell them, ‘Let the people speak. Let the people speak.’ Because we need to hear. We want to hear.”

Morris did not return to the hearing and did not respond to a phone call later Friday. 

In a meeting that went on for about six hours, the committee heard from several voting rights advocates. 

Before the second recess, all four of Louisiana’s Black congressmen, past and present, since the Reconstruction era spoke to the committee: current U.S. Reps. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans; Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge; and former Congressmen William Jefferson and Cedric Richmond.

Troy Carter’s 2nd District seat would be eliminated in the version of the map Kleinpeter has said lawmakers are most likely to advance. The congressman is the uncle of state Sen. Gary Carter.

“Today, here in Louisiana we’re being tested and the whole world is watching,” Troy Carter said. “The question before us is not merely about lines on a map. The question before us is whether we will honor the principle that every citizen deserves equal protection of the law.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s new decision gutting a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act clears the way for state officials to drastically reshape not only Congress but also state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and even local school boards.

The ruling, released last week in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, dismantled some of the final guardrails protecting the electoral power of Black, Hispanic and other racial minority voters that had been enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal civil rights law that bars racial discrimination in voting access.

The 6-3 decision all but nullifies a provision called Section 2 that required states to draw electoral maps to give racial minority voters the opportunity to elect their chosen candidates.

And while intense national attention on the case’s fallout has focused on the U.S.  House as the 2026 midterm congressional elections loom, the new ruling also applies to state legislative districts and maps for county or municipal elections.

Those localized changes are just hovering further down the road.

“While everyone has been focusing on what this means for the power in Congress, there’s a whole other sector of power that it changes,” said Davante Lewis, an elected member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission and one of the litigants in a case that pushed Louisiana to create the congressional maps that were eventually struck down in the Callais ruling.

“This is a decision on who gets to serve on a school board, who gets to serve on a city council, who gets representation in the judiciary,” Lewis said.

Electoral maps are typically redrawn every 10 years after a census, but the Trump administration has encouraged Republican-led states to redraw districts to favor the GOP, a controversial move that has prompted some Democratic-led states to retaliate with gerrymandering of their own.

“But after 2030, I think we’re definitely going to see the impact of the Callais decision at the state level,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on voting rights, race and federalism.

Effects across the South

Critics of the ruling say it will fundamentally dilute the voting and governing power of Black and other minority citizens up and down the ballot, particularly in the South. There, many of the seats held by Black elected officials are in so-called opportunity districts that were created after the Voting Rights Act to allow Black and other minority voters to elect their preferred candidates.

“On the congressional level, we’re in this race to the bottom of redistricting, but when it comes to the state legislative level, we’ll have to wait and see,” Crum said.

In 10 state legislatures across the South, Republicans could gain more than 190 seats currently held by Democrats, most of them Black representatives in majority-minority districts, according to an analysis released in December by voting rights groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund. At the federal level, one analysis from The New York Times found that Democrats stand to lose a dozen U.S. House seats across the South.

In the hours after the Supreme Court ruling, Republicans across the nation began calling for maps to be redrawn, particularly in states where courts had forced them to create districts where Black or other racial minorities made up the majority of residents.

A US Supreme Court ruling hammered voting rights. What does it mean and what happens now?

“These lines should all be colorblind. You should never be basing a decision on race,” said Arizona Republican state Sen. Warren Petersen, who’s president of the state Senate and running for attorney general.

He told Stateline he believes both congressional and state legislative maps should be redrawn in Arizona — even if it takes litigation.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves called a special legislative session set for later this month, when he wants lawmakers to draw new election maps for Mississippi state Supreme Court districts. A federal judge in Mississippi will have to quickly decide whether to adopt a new map for some special elections scheduled for November.

Democrats, too, took action. In Illinois, lawmakers backtracked on a proposed constitutional amendment that would have directed lawmakers to consider race in drawing district lines, a provision taken directly from the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon, a Democrat, told Capitol News Illinois that lawmakers want to learn more about the ruling before putting such an amendment on a ballot for voters to decide, to prevent unintended consequences that could undermine voting rights.

In many states, Republicans are focusing first on congressional redistricting. Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry postponed his state’s U.S. House primaries even though absentee voting has already begun. In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey called a special state legislative session aiming to move the state’s May 19 primary in at least a handful of districts. Prominent Georgia Republicans were also calling for their state’s political maps to be redrawn, though GOP Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement that it’s too late to do that this year.

And in North Dakota, the ruling leaves a tribal redistricting case in limbo. Tribes had used Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to sue the state over a legislative district map the North Dakota legislature approved in 2021.

Gerrymandering for partisan advantage is legal at the federal level, though some states do have their own laws restricting or prohibiting it. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is arguing the Supreme Court ruling invalidates voter-approved amendments that prevent the state from gerrymandering districts based on race or political party.

For most states, though, state officials can redraw maps explicitly to favor Republican voters, for example, so long as they don’t state their intention to disadvantage voters based on race.

‘Ripple like wildfire’

Critics of last week’s Callais ruling also worry it will rapidly erode the pipeline that has made it possible for Black and other minority candidates to get elected to office.

“Now, state legislatures can draw maps where they are picking their voters instead of their voters picking them,” said Lewis, the Louisiana commissioner. “They can dilute the power of Black and brown people serving in the state legislature, which means there’s fewer people to fight a congressional map” that pulls voting power away from minority communities.

He worries that if Black Democratic state lawmakers oppose their white Republican colleagues in legislatures with GOP majorities, those colleagues could redraw maps to eliminate the Black lawmakers’ seats, claiming they’re doing it only for partisan reasons.

The diluting of minority voting power, he said, “is going to ripple like wildfire.”

At the most local level, city councils and county boards typically draw those voting maps, but the ruling could be used to apply to them as well, said Crum, the law professor. 

Arizona is one of a handful of states where an independent commission, rather than the state legislature, determines both congressional and legislative districts. Outside of a court order, it can’t convene before the turn of the decade.

Petersen, the Arizona state senator, said he’s prepared to litigate if the state’s redistricting commission doesn’t take action to redraw districts that he said are unconstitutionally drawn. He doesn’t expect new maps before 2028, though.

“We’ve heard complaints from constituents that they don’t like the way their district was drawn,” he said. “We have some people here in Arizona that represent completely far-flung areas.

“I do think you’ll get a better outcome on some of these legislative districts” by removing race-based districting, he said.

Lawmakers in some states have tried to guard against the loss of federal protections by introducing their own state-level voting rights bills. Ten states have their own versions of the federal Voting Rights Act, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington.

Lawmakers in at least 10 other states have introduced such bills this year alone: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The new Supreme Court ruling doesn’t render those laws unconstitutional, said Crum.

“But people who are seeking to undermine those state Voting Rights Acts are certainly going to rely on some of the themes” of the recent ruling, Crum said. “You might see them try and replicate some of the moves the court made.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that Maryland has a state-level voting rights law, which was enacted last week.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Louisiana is not experiencing ordinary political turbulence. We are watching democratic instability unfold in real time.

Within a matter of days, voters across this state have been forced to absorb three major disruptions at once: the dismantling of Black voting representation through the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais; the suspension of congressional primary elections already in progress; and a statewide constitutional amendment that could fundamentally reshape public education in East Baton Rouge Parish and beyond.

The timing could not be more critical. Election Day is May 16. Early voting began Saturday. Absentee ballots have already been distributed. Yet Gov. Jeff Landry’s executive order suspended Louisiana’s closed party congressional primaries after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the state’s congressional map. 

Voters are now left in a vacuum of information, told that congressional races will still appear on their ballots, but that their votes in these contests won’t count.

That should alarm every person in this state, regardless of party affiliation.

A democracy cannot function when election rules shift after the machinery of voting has already begun moving. This creates confusion and distrust precisely when public confidence is most fragile. 

Black communities, in particular, understand the historical weight of sudden procedural changes in elections. Louisiana does not get to separate this moment from that history.

This erosion of collective representation is not limited to the ballot box. It is also manifesting in the very structure of our local institutions. 

On the May 16 ballot voters are being asked to decide on Constitutional Amendment 2, which would formally recognize the St. George Community School System with independent authority to receive state funding and raise local revenues though taxes.

When coupled with its implementing legislation, the amendment mandates the transfer of public school lands, facilities and assets from the East Baton Rouge Parish School System to the new St. George system by June 30, 2027. Reports indicate that East Baton Rouge schools could lose roughly $100 million if this separation proceeds.

This is bigger than one city, one amendment or one election cycle. This is about fragmentation: the fragmentation of voting rights, public education and, ultimately, public trust. The people most harmed by this fracturing are always the communities with the fewest resources to absorb the blow: Black families, working-class families, disabled residents and children already navigating underfunded schools.

Supporters of these measures frame them as issues of local control or administrative necessity. But language matters less than outcomes. When systems repeatedly reorganize power away from collective accountability and toward isolated control structures, inequity expands. History has shown us this repeatedly.

The most dangerous part is how normalized this chaos is becoming. Louisianans are being conditioned to accept government by disruption. Maps change overnight, elections pause midstream, public assets become bargaining chips. 

That is not healthy governance. That is democratic erosion dressed in procedural language.

The people of Louisiana deserve clarity before elections begin, not after. They deserve stable representation and public institutions designed to serve communities rather than divide them into competing islands of power. Because once citizens begin believing their vote is conditional, their schools are negotiable, and their representation is disposable, democracy itself begins to fracture.

And fractured systems rarely fail equally.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act could upend American politics and trigger a new rush to redraw congressional districts.

The opinion released on Wednesday, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, holds sweeping consequences for how states and local governments draw district lines at all levels of government, from Congress to school boards. 

Louisiana, whose congressional map is at the center of the case, may even suspend an upcoming primary election so state lawmakers can pass a new map. Other states are also weighing new gerrymanders, either this year or before the 2028 election. 

Gerrymandering refers to drawing political maps for the purpose of gaining some form of unfair advantage — whether partisan or racial or to help or hurt an incumbent or candidate.

Following the decision, Democrats are calling for Congress to pass new federal voting rights legislation, but President Donald Trump would likely veto it. Others are urging more radical changes, including expanding the size of the Supreme Court.

As the nation responds to the decision, here’s a States Newsroom look at the decision, what it means and what could happen next.

What is Louisiana v. Callais?

After the 2020 census, the Louisiana Legislature passed a congressional map that included one district where a majority of residents are Black. About a third of the state’s population is Black.

States typically draw new congressional lines once a decade following the census, though several states have pushed through new maps this year after Trump called on Republicans to maximize their political advantage heading into the midterm elections this November.

Black voters challenged the Louisiana map and an appeals court ordered lawmakers to pass a new map. The legislature in 2024 approved a map that includes a second district where a majority of residents are Black, also called a majority-minority district.

In response, a group of white voters sued over the new map, claiming it violated the U.S. Constitution and was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law and the 15th Amendment prohibits denying the right to vote on the basis of race.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Phillip Callais, hence the case’s name. The New York Times reported last year that Callais is a veteran who lives near Baton Rouge. 

The Supreme Court held its first oral argument on the case in March 2025. But instead of issuing a decision later that spring, the court held a second round of oral argument in October. 

At that time, comments by the conservative justices strongly suggested the court was interested in weakening the federal Voting Rights Act.

What is the Voting Rights Act and what role did it play in redistricting?

The Voting Rights Act, or VRA, is a 1965 federal law passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson.

The law was designed to stop racial discrimination in voting and combat Jim Crow laws like literacy tests that Southern states used to prevent Black people from voting.

It contains several sections but the Supreme Court decision in Callais dealt with Section 2. That section prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race and other characteristics. In 1982, Congress expanded Section 2 to ban voting practices that have a discriminatory effect, whether or not the law was intended to discriminate.

Section 2 has acted as a ban on racial gerrymandering, or the practice of drawing districts to minimize the political influence of minority voters. Over time, that’s led to the creation of numerous majority-minority congressional districts.

Many of these majority-minority districts are located in Republican-controlled Southern states  but are held by Democrats. In the past, if states drew new maps to spread minority voters across several districts, they could face challenges in federal court under Section 2.

What did the Supreme Court decide?

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 

The court found that because the Voting Rights Act didn’t require Louisiana to create a second majority-minority district, the state didn’t have a compelling reason to consider race when drawing its map.

Under the court’s reasoning, Section 2 only applies when evidence supports a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred. In other words, lawmakers only violate Section 2 when they draw districts with the purpose of affording minority voters less opportunity because of their race.

The court’s majority opinion says “none of the historical evidence presented by plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by all of the court’s conservatives: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The court’s three liberal justices — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented.

Why is the decision a big deal?

The decision empowers states to gerrymander in ways that break apart districts where a majority of residents are Black, Hispanic or belong to another minority group.

In 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts would no longer take cases about partisan gerrymandering. That’s where states draw maps to help a political party.

Because many majority-minority districts in the South are held by Democrats, the Callais decision gives Republican states the power to break apart these districts if they can show they are doing so for a partisan purpose.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in a dissent.

In the short term, the decision means several Black Democrats in the U.S. House may lose their seats if states pass new maps either this year before the November midterm elections or before the 2028 election. At least one projection has pegged the potential losses as high as 19 seats.

The loss of even a few Black representatives would constitute the largest drop in Black representation in Congress since Reconstruction following the Civil War, according to an NPR analysis. 

In the long term, minority voters will have a more difficult time electing their preferred candidates if they are moved into majority-white districts. The decision also applies to state legislative districts, meaning the number of Black state lawmakers may drop as well.

What impact does the Voting Rights Act have after the ruling?

Not nearly as much.

The Supreme Court’s decision didn’t strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But Kagan and other critics of the opinion say the protections once extended by Section 2 are effectively dead.

To block a map under Section 2, challengers will now have to show states intentionally discriminated against minority voters, a very difficult standard when states can say they drew maps for partisan advantage.

In a series of decisions during the past 13 years, the Supreme Court has also weakened other elements of the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, the court effectively blocked preclearance, another major portion of the law contained in Section 5. Preclearance required states and local governments with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes.

Preclearance applied to most Southern states and a handful of others. The justices didn’t strike down preclearance, but ruled that the criteria used to determine whether governments should be subject to preclearance was unconstitutional.

The law required districts that had voting tests in place in 1964 and had less than 50% turnout in the 1964 presidential election as eligible for preclearance. The court found that the criteria no longer made sense and were outdated. 

In theory, Congress could pass new criteria that would restore preclearance.

How are Republicans responding?

Republicans in Southern states are pushing for new maps that could hand their party more seats in the November elections — but also oust Black Democratic members of Congress.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, announced on Thursday that the state’s primary election, set for mid-May, would be paused. The suspension will give time for state lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map to eliminate the state’s second majority-minority district.

“We are working together with the Legislature and the Secretary of State’s office to develop a path forward,” Landry said in a statement.

Florida lawmakers passed a new map hours after the court’s decision that could provide Republicans with up to four additional seats. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had introduced the map earlier in the week and had cited Callais in urging lawmakers to act.

In Tennessee, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor, called on state lawmakers to pass a new map. Prominent Republicans in Georgia said the state should pass a new map.

Not all Republicans are pushing for immediate action. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said that while she supports the Supreme Court’s decision, the state wasn’t in a position to hold a special session to redistrict.

How are Democrats responding?

Democrats have condemned the Supreme Court’s opinion and say lawmakers and the public should fight back.

Many Democrats say Congress should pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after civil rights activist and Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis, who died in 2020. The legislation would set new criteria for preclearance, seeking to restore the practice after the Supreme Court stopped it in 2013.

The U.S. House passed the measure in 2021, but it didn’t advance through the Senate. 

Enacting the measure remains extremely difficult. If Democrats retake control of Congress in the November elections, Trump would almost certainly veto the measure. Republicans in the U.S. Senate would also likely block the bill, unless Democrats eliminate the filibuster.

Democrats are also weighing a new round of gerrymanders in blue states. While most attention has focused on Southern Republican states, Democrats can now also engage in racial vote dilution in states like California to secure additional U.S. House seats.

Some Democrats and opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision are pushing for other responses. 

They include expanding the size of the court from nine justices to dilute its conservative majority, implementing term limits for justices, banning mid-decade redistricting or requiring states to use independent commissions to draw congressional maps.

“We must continue to fight for a democracy in which every vote counts, and in which every vote holds equal power, starting by banning mid-decade gerrymanders nationwide and establishing fair redistricting criteria,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said in a statement.

But those changes would require federal legislation, giving Republicans the opportunity to stop the proposals through filibusters in the Senate or by Trump’s veto.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office on Monday invoked an upcoming landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the role of race in drawing congressional districts to justify the Republican’s proposed gerrymander.

“The use of race in redistricting should never happen,” the governor’s general counsel, David Axelman, wrote in a memo unveiling a map that aims to hand Republicans four additional U.S. House seats in Florida.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered an opinion sharply weakening a major portion of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Even before the decision, Republicans and Democrats across the country were scrambling to get ahead of the court’s anticipated ruling. 

The rush comes even as state legislative sessions wind down and the window to redraw maps rapidly closes ahead of the midterm elections in November — likely pushing most redistricting battles into the 2028 election cycle.

The opinion in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, could reverberate for decades. The court’s conservative majority significantly curtailed the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps. 

Until now, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has limited states from using maps that dilute the voting power of minority citizens.

“If the Supreme Court does decide to gut or significantly weaken Section 2 of the VRA, we’re very concerned that it would give, basically, the green light to states to racially gerrymander,” Michael McNulty, policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said in an interview ahead of the decision.

Republicans could ultimately secure up to 19 U.S. House seats nationally directly because of the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a projection by Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights group, and the Black Voters Matter Fund, which advocates on behalf of Black voters. At the state level, the groups have projected that Republicans could gain up to 200 state legislative seats across the South. 

“It is hard to overstate what an earthquake this will be for American politics,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote in a blog post following the opinion’s release on Wednesday.

Louisiana case

A group of white voters challenged Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander after the state in 2024 created a second district where a majority of voters are Black. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices agreed, ruling 6-3 that the map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the state didn’t need to create a second majority-minority district.

In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “none of the historical evidence presented by plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination.”

Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent that the Supreme Court has “had its sights set” on the Voting Rights Act for more than a decade.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote.

Following the opinion, Republican-led legislatures across the South are expected to move to break apart Democratic districts where a majority of residents are Black or from other minority groups. 

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, called on the state legislature to reconvene and redraw the state’s congressional districts to create another Republican-held seat in Memphis. Blackburn, who is running for governor, said an additional seat is essential to cement President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves last week announced a special session to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts, to begin 21 days after the court releases its decision.

“It is a decision that could (and in my view should) forever change the way we draw electoral maps,” Reeves said in a statement announcing the session.

Although the Supreme Court case centered on Louisiana, state officials are likely out of time to adopt a new map for this year’s election. The primary election is set for May 16.

Still, Louisiana will be free to pursue redistricting next year.

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, Sr., a Democrat who represents one of the state’s two majority-minority districts, said the court’s decision was a “devastating blow” to the promise of equal representation.

“This ruling is about far more than lines on a map — it’s about whether Black Louisianians will have a meaningful opportunity to make their voices heard,” Carter said in a statement.

The redistricting wars of 2026

As of 2024, roughly a third of U.S. House seats represented majority-minority districts — 122 held by Democrats and 26 held by Republicans, according to estimates by Ballotpedia. Texas and California account for nearly half of all the districts.

Seven states have already taken the extraordinary step of redrawing their maps this year after President Donald Trump urged Republicans to draw lines that maximize partisan advantage ahead of the midterms. Maps are typically redrawn every 10 years after the census.

Texas and California struck first, followed by Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah. Virginia voters last week approved a redraw, and Florida lawmakers approved a new map Wednesday. 

All told, Republicans may emerge from the redistricting war with a small net advantage of a handful of seats if the Florida plan is enacted and the other maps are upheld.

The calendar will prove a major obstacle to additional gerrymanders this year. Primary elections have already been held in some southern states and ballots have been distributed in others. 

Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas have already held primaries, while ballots have been distributed in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. 

But after November the clock resets, giving states more than a year to pursue further changes to their maps before the 2028 election.

“We are much more concerned about the impact on 2028 and beyond that that would have, letting these politicians basically just pick their voters instead of the voters picking them,” McNulty said.

John R. Lewis bill

As Democrats look ahead to Callais’ likely fallout in the coming years, they have begun urgently calling for action in Congress and at the state level. They also say the decision emphasizes the stakes of this year’s elections.

“Today is a devastating day for democracy and a wake-up call for all those who seek to protect it,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said in a statement.

Democrats in Congress have repeatedly offered the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Named after the civil rights activist and Georgia congressman who died in 2020, the legislation aims to strengthen Section 2 and other elements of the current Voting Rights Act, though it’s unclear whether the bill would be constitutional under the Callais decision.

The U.S. House, under Democratic control, passed the legislation in 2021 but it was filibustered in the Senate. Some lawmakers are speaking about the measure again, and Democrats may take control of Congress in November’s elections—though they would still face President Donald Trump in the White House. 

“We can and must revive the Voting Rights Act,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat and the ranking member of the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections, said at a shadow hearing on voting rights on Monday.

For their part, Republicans hailed the Supreme Court decision as long overdue.

U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement said “activists” for too long had manipulated the redistricting process to achieve political outcomes, dividing Americans in the process.

“The Supreme Court made clear that our elections should be decided by voters, not engineered through unconstitutional mandates,” Hudson said.

Voting Rights Act over the years

Over more than a decade, the Supreme Court has narrowed the potency of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law banning racial discrimination in voting that came as Congress battled Jim Crow laws in southern states. 

The measure was intended to help enforce the U.S. Constitution’s 14th and 15th amendments, which guarantee equal protection under the law and prohibit denying the right to vote on the basis of race.

In 2013, the court effectively halted preclearance — the requirement that some states and local governments with a history of discrimination obtain federal permission before changing their voting practices. At the time of the decision, most southern states and a handful of others were subject to preclearance.

The Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that federal courts cannot review allegations of partisan gerrymandering. The decision cleared the way for state lawmakers to gerrymander their maps for political advantage without fear they would be second-guessed by federal judges. 

The opinion helped empower a wave of gerrymanders after the 2020 census and set the stage for this year’s mid-decade redistricting.

Turning to the legislatures

Facing a bleak federal landscape, some voting rights advocates are increasingly turning to state legislatures. The Supreme Court decision undercutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will likely intensify efforts to advance state-level legislation.

“Because political participation is inherently local, it is imperative to press for protections at the ground level,” Todd Cox, associate director counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, a racial justice legal organization, said at the shadow hearing.

Some Democratic state lawmakers already introduced measures in anticipation of an unfavorable Supreme Court decision.

The Illinois House last week approved a state constitutional amendment that would require districts to be drawn “to ensure that no citizen is denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of his or her choice on account of race.”

The Illinois amendment would also require, where practical, the creation of racial coalition or influence districts — terms that refer to districts where racial minorities together constitute a majority of residents. The measure, which must also pass the state Senate before going to voters, was a pre-response to the Callais opinion.

“This will ensure that Illinois will always recognize the fundamental principle that a democracy of the people, by the people and for the people must include all the people,” Illinois Democratic House Speaker Emanuel Welch told reporters after the amendment advanced.

Illinois Republicans have cast the amendment as a Democratic power grab. The state has some of the most gerrymandered maps in the nation, Illinois House Minority Leader Tony McCombie, a Republican, said in a statement. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project has given Illinois’ maps an overall “F” grade.

“Let’s be clear: this has nothing to do with strengthening democracy,” McCombie said. “It’s about locking in one-party control at any cost.”