The Trump administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to empower states to review their voter rolls for noncitizens just days before elections, a change that voting rights advocates say would risk disenfranchising Americans.

The U.S. Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to wade into a legal fight between the Republican National Committee and a host of Democratic and voting rights groups over a series of voting restrictions in Arizona.

If the court takes the case, it could lead to a significant decision granting states greater leeway to purge alleged noncitizen voters close to elections and mandate that voters prove their citizenship — a key aim of the SAVE America Act, President Donald Trump’s signature elections legislation that’s stalled in Congress.

The high court’s decision could arrive prior to the 2028 presidential election.

Voting in Arizona

Arizona requires individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to vote in state elections. Residents who don’t offer documentation can still use a federal form to register, but can only vote in federal elections. 

Election officials must run the names of federal-only voters through a U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizens.

The Justice Department argues that the Supreme Court should affirm the Arizona law and find that it doesn’t violate the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 federal law that sets rules for how voters are registered and when states can remove them from their rolls. The NVRA imposes strict limits on canceling registrations in the 90 days before a federal election.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that Arizona’s law violates the NVRA.

“But that decision eliminates the flexibility the Act promises to States when enforcing their voter qualifications,” the Justice Department says in its brief.

While the Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to take the case, the underlying petition was filed by the Republican National Committee. Its chairman, Joe Gruters, in a statement said it was “unacceptable” that the RNC was still having to defend the Arizona law.

“Federal law is clear: only U.S. citizens have the right to vote in American elections,” Gruters said.

Appeals court ruling 

Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group that’s opposing the RNC in court, said in a statement the Justice Department’s brief shows “MAGA Republicans and their friends in the Trump Administration are once again trying to disenfranchise Latino voters in Arizona.”

Opponents of Arizona’s law argue the 9th Circuit decision was correct. The state law, they say, goes well beyond what’s allowed under the NVRA. Election officials may remove individual voters in certain circumstances in the run-up to an election but the law prohibits sweeping purges.

“States cannot circumvent the limits on systematic removals that Congress — exercising its express constitutional authority to regulate federal elections — put in place to ensure that eligible voters have adequate time to correct erroneous removal procedures, thereby protecting Americans’ fundamental right to vote,” the Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party argued in a brief filed Tuesday.

Democrats and voting rights groups warn about expanding use of Homeland Security’s SAVE system, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, that’s mandated under Arizona law. 

Initially a program used by states to check whether individual noncitizens were eligible for government benefits, the Trump administration has overhauled it into a tool that can verify citizenship by checking information in federal databases. 

SAVE can now check millions of names simultaneously. Many Republican states have begun uploading their voter rolls into SAVE to search for potential noncitizens. 

Critics of the program say SAVE has falsely flagged U.S. citizens, a problem that could be exacerbated if the Supreme Court allows its widespread use in the weeks before an election. Last-minute misidentifications could leave little time for voters to prove their citizenship.

Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said in an interview that the 90-day period serves as a “pencils down” time to minimize the possibility of errors just before elections.

“Anytime you’re matching one giant list to another giant list, you’re going to have mistakes,” Levitt said. “If you execute this systemic list maintenance two days before the election, those mistakes are going to keep eligible voters from voting.”

Voter purges

At a U.S. House hearing on the NVRA in December, Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, pointed to several voter purges, including a 2024 effort in Virginia, to highlight the dangers of last-minute removals. 

That August, Virginia’s Republican governor at the time, Glenn Youngkin, ordered election officials to scrub the state’s voter list for noncitizens. More than 1,600 voter registrations were canceled, with citizens swept up in the purge. The Supreme Court in October 2024 declined to overturn the purge.

“There is no dispute that states and localities must keep their voter rolls accurate and up to date,” Lakin wrote in her opening statement. “But the integrity of our elections is not threatened by the phantom menace of widespread noncitizen voting — it is threatened by aggressive purge practices that wrongfully strike legitimate voters from the rolls and by unnecessary barriers to registration that prevent eligible Americans from getting on those rolls in the first place.

Noncitizen voting

The specter of noncitizen voting has been a central focus of Trump’s second term, despite studies showing it’s an extremely rare occurrence. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

Utah recently announced that a review of its 2 million registered voters identified just 27 confirmed noncitizens and an additional 25 “probable” noncitizens — a miniscule percentage of voters.

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia in a so-far unsuccessful effort to force them to hand over private voter data so the information can be run through the SAVE system to search for noncitizens. In late March, Trump signed an executive order to restrict the transmission of ballots through the mail, though several lawsuits have been filed against it.

Trump also continues to demand that senators pass the SAVE America Act, even though it has stalled in the U.S. Senate. While the legislation would set a national proof of citizenship rule, some states have enacted or are weighing their own requirements. 

Republican attorneys general

Five states — Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, New Hampshire and South Dakota — ask for proof of citizenship when voters register for the first time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. One state, Wyoming, also requires proof when voters update their registration.

But Arizona was the only state before 2025 to maintain two separate voter rolls to enforce its proof of citizenship rules, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The distinction helps explain why the Arizona case is now poised for consideration by the Supreme Court.

A host of Republican state attorneys general, led by Kansas’ Kris Kobach, have filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the Arizona case. They say the 9th Circuit gutted Arizona’s “common-sense measures” to protect its elections.

“This case presents yet another assault on State efforts to promote election security,” the states’ brief says.

In addition to Kansas, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia signed on to the brief.

The Supreme Court has sent conflicting signals about proof of citizenship laws in the past. In August 2024, the court issued an unsigned order on its “shadow docket” allowing Arizona to enforce its proof of citizenship requirements for the 2024 election. 

But four years earlier, the justices declined to take a case over a Kansas proof of citizenship law. That left in place an appeals court decision blocking the law, which remains unenforceable.

The Arizona case would offer the Supreme Court a way to provide a more definitive opinion. If the justices decide soon to take it, they would likely hold oral arguments in the fall and potentially issue a decision next spring, more than a year before the 2028 presidential election.

The Justice Department’s brief says the case “offers an opportunity to resolve these important election-law issues outside the setting of a contested election.”

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.”

JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri — Control of the U.S. House may run through a courtroom in Missouri.

In a red brick courthouse across the street from the state Capitol, the seven black-robed judges of the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday morning weighed the fate of a Republican gerrymander aimed at ousting U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a 11-term Democrat from Kansas City.

In the afternoon, they upheld the map.

Its opponents “failed to show the 2025 Map clearly and undoubtedly violates the requirements” of the state constitution, the court ruled hours after holding oral arguments.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s late April decision sharply curtailing the use of race in redistricting, much of the legal fight over gerrymandering is moving to state courts. The decision, Louisiana vs. Callais, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which limited states’ ability to divide districts where a majority of residents belong to a racial minority group.

Southern Republican states have rushed forward new maps over the past two weeks that take advantage of the landmark opinion, adding to a handful of others, including Missouri, that already drew new lines in recent months at President Donald Trump’s behest before the midterms elections this November. Another wave of gerrymanders across the rest of the country will likely follow next year ahead of the 2028 election.

State supreme courts may have the final word on some of the maps. Even if the maps don’t involve issues decided in Callais, like the challenge in Missouri, many states have constitutional or statutory provisions that curb gerrymandering and limit last-minute changes to elections — providing gerrymandering opponents with grounds to challenge new district boundaries.

With federal redistricting lawsuits increasingly difficult, state laws offer gerrymandering opponents another path. 

Thirty states have some form of a constitutional requirement for free elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And at least 10 state supreme courts have found that state courts can decide cases involving allegations of partisan gerrymandering, according to a 2024 review by the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 

“I think state courts are primarily going to be the place where future fights around these maps are playing out in a post-Callais landscape,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Legal challenges abound

The elevated importance of state courts was on full display Friday, when the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated an election in which voters narrowly approved a Democratic map. The decision leaves a new map in California as the party’s only successful response so far to the GOP redistricting onslaught. Democrats have made a longshot request to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Virginia ruling.

Lawsuits have already been filed in state courts over new maps in Florida and Louisiana. Alabama’s new map could also face a legal challenge in state court, even after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the gerrymander to take effect. 

At stake in these courtroom fights is which party will control the U.S. House over the next two years, earning the power to advance or thwart legislation. While Democrats remain generally favored to retake the chamber in the November midterm elections, Republicans will likely emerge from the gerrymandering war with at least a handful of seats secured.

Suddenly, every state supreme court decision — including over a single seat in Missouri — takes on greater significance.

Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, which is helping challenge the Missouri map, told reporters on Monday that the state’s high court had a “spotlight on” it.

“Is the court going to do what it has done in the past in a nonpartisan way that is faithful to their own precedent,” she asked ahead of the decision. “Or are they going to roll over?”

Missouri case

The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly in September approved a map intended to leave the state with just one Democrat in Congress, in the St. Louis area. Kansas City was divided among three districts, splitting apart its Democratic-leaning and racially diverse core. 

The Missouri Supreme Court considered three challenges to the map. Two similar lawsuits argue that some of the congressional districts don’t follow the state constitution’s requirements that districts be as compact as possible.

A third lawsuit argues that the map shouldn’t be in effect for the 2026 election because opponents in December submitted more than 305,000 signatures seeking to force a statewide referendum vote on the lines. In the past, state officials have paused the implementation of measures subject to a referendum until a vote is held, but in this instance they say the new lines are active.

During Tuesday’s oral arguments, the judges sat almost entirely stone-faced as they listened. Only one judge asked a single question during arguments that stretched for more than an hour, offering no sense of how the court would rule.

“There is no such thing as a perfect map or a perfect district,” Missouri Principal Deputy Solicitor General Kathleen Hunker said.

Jonathan Hawley, an attorney representing Missouri voters who argue the referendum means the map isn’t in effect, said his case will decide whether the people of Missouri “still have a meaningful referendum.”

“The referendum right is the people’s veto,” Hawley said.

The Missouri Supreme Court hours later ruled against both challenges to the maps — allowing the new lines to be used this year.

“Had the drafters intended a referendum petition filing to automatically suspend any act of the General Assembly at issue in the referendum petition, they would have so stated,” the court’s opinion says.

Florida’s GOP gerrymander

Only two Southern states, Florida and Kentucky, allow courts to decide partisan gerrymandering cases.

Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, hasn’t taken up redistricting this year. But a Florida Supreme Court decision striking down a new map there would effectively offset Democrats’ loss at the Virginia Supreme Court.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a map passed by the state legislature during a special session on the same day as the Callais decision. The new congressional boundaries are designed to hand Republicans up to four additional seats.

Several voting rights groups have sued, alleging the map violates the Florida Constitution. A 2010 amendment approved by voters prohibits districts drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent.

“Instead of abiding by this law, the Legislature is defying the will of voters and backing a map that was crafted entirely with partisan intent,” Simone Leeper, senior legal counsel for redistricting at Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement. 

The Campaign Legal Center and the UCLA Voting Rights Project have sued jointly over the map.

DeSantis’s office told state lawmakers ahead of this year’s special session that the 2010 amendment requires the state legislature to account for race when drawing districts — and that the provisions regarding race can’t be severed from the rest of the amendment. In effect, DeSantis contends the whole amendment must be thrown out.

The Florida governor’s pitch, coupled with the Callais decision, persuaded GOP lawmakers.

“I have a ton of comfort because the Callais decision came out,” Florida state Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican, said. “I got to read it, and it perfectly summarizes exactly why we could, and should, change our 2022 maps.”

Map opponents’ chance of success at the Florida Supreme Court is unclear. The court as recently as 2015 blocked a congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, but it has moved to the right in the years since. Six of the seven current justices were appointed by DeSantis and the other was appointed by a different Republican governor.

“The composition of the Florida Supreme Court has changed dramatically since that earlier ruling,” Bannon, the Brennan Center expert, said. “So I think there are questions about will the court be as open to those arguments.”

Process challenges

In other Southern states, map opponents are turning to arguments beside partisan gerrymandering.

The Tennessee chapter of the NAACP has sued Republican Gov. Bill Lee and the state General Assembly to block a gerrymander passed last week from taking effect. The organization alleges Lee violated the state constitution in how he called a special session for a new map. 

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, has urged a court to dismiss Lee and the legislature from lawsuit because they don’t conduct elections.

Alabama Democrats and voting rights groups are weighing a legal challenge to a new map that would focus on a 2022 amendment to the state constitution. The amendment requires election law changes to be made at least six months before a general election — a deadline of May 3 this year. Alabama’s redistricting special session began the next day.

In Louisiana, state lawmakers have not yet passed a new map after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s current lines as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the legislature had previously created a second majority-Black district. Lawmakers are expected to advance a map aimed at ousting one of the state’s two Democratic House members, who are both Black.

After the Callais decision, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state’s congressional primary elections although roughly 42,000 absentee ballots had already been cast. Lawsuits challenging the suspension have been filed in both federal and state court.

Too late to change?

In Missouri on Tuesday, lawyers for Republican state officials took the opposite approach, urging the state supreme court to keep the map in place for the 2026 election, even if the judges strike it down. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, told reporters afterward that preventing the state from using the map now would lead to confusion, even as 12 weeks remain before the primary election.

“It’ll be disarray for the people that have been going to town halls and listening to candidates,” Hoskins said. “It would be disarray for the candidates that are running and going out and meeting voters in their district. And it’d be disarray for the local election authorities and county clerks that have already started instituting” the new map.

Hoskins’ fears turned out to be unfounded, as the court upheld the map.

Cleaver, who is running for reelection, has said that his work ethic or commitment to voters won’t change regardless of his district boundaries. 

“If I have to serve the people who live just outside of Columbia and Jefferson City, then I’ll do that,” he said when he filed to run earlier this year.

Attorneys for the ACLU of Missouri, which supported challenges to the map, said it was unfair to Missouri residents for the state to create a problem and then argue it’s too late to change it. 

At a rally outside the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday, ACLU of Missouri Policy Director Tori Schafer expressed confidence the judges would side with map opponents — hours before they allowed the lines to move forward.

“But let me clear,” Schafer said, “democracy did not begin in a courtroom and it will not be saved in a courtroom.”

Florida Phoenix reporter Mitch Perry contributed to this report.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday extended a highly anticipated stay blocking an appellate court’s pause on telehealth abortion access until May 14.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approved medication-abortion regimen remains available via telehealth until then, following a week of uncertainty among abortion patients and providers.

“With this critical temporary administrative stay extended, we hope that some of the chaos and confusion inflicted on patients and providers last weekend will be abated,” said Evan Masingill, CEO of abortion-pill manufacturer GenBioPro, one of the defendants in the case, in a statement.

On May 4, the Supreme Court temporarily stayed the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling to reinstate the FDA’s in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone that the Biden administration officially lifted in 2023. Over the past week, several doctors groups submitted friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that cutting off access to mifepristone could harm many women seeking abortions and miscarriage management. Republican attorneys general from 23 states, meanwhile, urged the Supreme Court not to allow providers to send mifepristone through the mail. 

People in states with abortion bans or diminished abortion access continue to depend on abortion providers prescribing FDA’s approved mifepristone-misoprostol regimen through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.

According to new preliminary findings from the Society of Family Planning, telehealth abortion comprised 28% of all abortions at the end of 2025, an increase from 25% at the end of 2024.

Attorneys representing Louisiana have argued that in addition to undermining a state abortion ban, the federal rulemaking process allowing telehealth prescriptions of medication abortion was flawed.  

University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at the time the Biden-era rule was implemented, said the policy was well considered and based on evidence. 

“The 2023 update was the result of an incredibly careful, deliberate, time-consuming, painstaking process to make sure that they were following what the evidence was,” Bagenstos said. If, the plaintiffs were to prevail, he added, ending telehealth access to mifepristone nationwide would have “really harmful effects on women across the country, as well as really destabilizing effects on the drug approval system.” 

Louisiana’s lawsuit against mifepristone has nationwide implications and could threaten residents in states with abortion access and so-called abortion shield laws, such as Maryland. 

Regardless of what happens in this case, abortion providers told Stateline they are determined to continue providing telehealth abortions, though potentially without mifepristone. Dr. Angel Foster, a telehealth provider in Massachusetts, a shield law state, said in the past week, about 100 patients have requested pills for future use, compared with 34 in the entire month of April. She said constantly changing rules around abortion access followed by sensational news headlines continue to create confusion for people seeking termination or miscarriage management.

“I live and breathe abortion at this point, and I find it can be hard to keep up with the ever-changing legal environment and the way that things are getting framed and phrased,” Foster said. “When you’re a patient and what you see are just the headlines, and you’ve got to figure out what it means for you, it’s really complicated.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the number of Republican attorneys general who asked the Supreme Court to keep mifepristone from being prescribed via telehealth visits. It should be 23. 

Stateline reporter Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.

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.

Advocates and opponents of abortion access say they’re wondering what happens next in a critical telehealth medication case that created chaos and confusion over the past week after an appeals court blocked nationwide access to the drug and, days later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary stay.

Alito’s stay preserves telehealth access until May 11. But it’s unclear what happens next for patients and providers.

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ Friday ruling to suspend a federal rule allowing telehealth prescriptions of the drug mifepristone while the lawsuit Louisiana v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration unfolds. Abortion providers are determined to continue providing the service, though potentially without mifepristone, the drug at the center for the case, which has had a high record of safety and efficacy since 2000.

Anti-abortion advocates have pushed to reverse the 2023 policy, enacted under former Democratic President Joe Biden, that allowed the FDA to drop its requirement that a patient see a provider in person before the medication can be prescribed. One similar national case already failed unanimously before the Supreme Court, but anti-abortion advocates are hoping this time around, with a more tailored approach, they will be successful.

Abortion-rights advocates say they’re prepared for whatever might happen in the courts, with contingency plans and a message that abortion will still be available even if the particular medication — mifepristone — is not.

Has the abortion pill been banned?

No. Mifepristone is still a legally approved FDA drug commonly used to terminate a pregnancy before 10 weeks’ gestation and is used off-label to treat miscarriages.

Is telehealth abortion still legal?

Yes, for now. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s administrative stay that expires on May 11, it is still legal to obtain abortion medication through telemedicine under the FDA’s regulations. Mifepristone is commonly used with a second drug, misoprostol, in medication abortions. The case doesn’t include misoprostol.

Who would be affected if telehealth access is struck down?

According to the Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount report, 27% of all abortions in the first six months of 2025 were obtained through telehealth, adding up to more than 162,000 cases.

Mifepristone is also used for patients experiencing a miscarriage; those patients also would have to visit a provider in person.

The ruling would apply nationwide, meaning that health providers couldn’t prescribe mifepristone without an in-person visit with the patient, even in states with abortion access.

What are the arguments on each side in Louisiana v. FDA?

Louisiana says the Biden-era policy undermines a state law banning abortion, and that the federal rulemaking process allowing telehealth prescriptions was flawed.

The Food and Drug Administration says the state doesn’t have standing to sue, but also notes that it’s taking more time to review the drug’s safety.

Two mifepristone drugmakers, meanwhile, have intervened on the FDA’s side.

What could happen next?

The Supreme Court has many options available moving forward, but a few options are most likely, said Katie Keith, founding director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. The justices could extend the stay when it expires May 11, or the court could make a longer-term ruling.

That could mean sending it back to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with or without upholding the initial ruling blocking the 2023 provision while the appeals case proceeds. Or justices could decide to take up the case and bypass the rest of the 5th Circuit appeal.

If it did that, the manufacturer defendants Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro have asked for an expedited process with a decision by June. That seems unlikely, Keith said, but the court has conducted expedited cases related to abortion before, such as the Moyle v. United States case in 2024 related to the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

What will providers do if they can’t use the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol?

Brittany Fonteno, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, said providers have been preparing since 2023 for the possibility of losing access to mifepristone. There have long been plans to switch to a misoprostol-only protocol, which is the main method of pregnancy termination across much of the world, she said.

“A lot of providers had created these policies and just needed to dust them off,” Fonteno said.

Dr. Angel Foster, co-founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which provides telehealth abortions to patients in all 50 states, said she and her team spent the weekend scrambling to contact patients waiting on medication abortion pills they had ordered before the ruling, and implementing a contingency plan that many abortion providers have been planning for since the lawsuits against mifepristone began in 2023.

That contingency involves pivoting from the FDA-approved mifepristone-misoprostol regimen to a misoprostol-only regimen.

Early Monday, Foster said her team was getting ready to ship misoprostol-only packages to patients at 2 p.m., but after the Supreme Court stayed the appeals court’s ruling on Monday morning, she said they were able to switch back to the mifepristone-misoprostol regimen.

Foster also said her organization was inundated with requests for pills that people could stockpile — people who didn’t need an abortion but were worried about losing access to the pills. Normally that’s a small fraction of the requests they receive, she said, but on Tuesday, they sent out more than had been sent in the entire month of April.

“Over the last two days, we’ve had a huge increase in the number of people from Louisiana requesting pills, especially pills for future use,” Foster said.

What are the pros and cons of the misoprostol-only regimen?

Dr. Maya Bass, a family physician in New Jersey who also provides abortions in Delaware, said misoprostol-only regimens are still safe and highly effective, but that the regimen has a lower efficacy rate than the combination of the two drugs and comes with potentially more side effects and risks.

Misoprostol-only regimens vary between 85% and 90% effective, while the combination is between 93% and 99% effective. The effective rates are lower as the gestational age increases.

The combination works well, Bass said, because mifepristone stops the hormone that allows the pregnancy to continue and signals to the body that the pregnancy is over. The misoprostol then helps soften the cervix and prompts the uterus to contract and expel the pregnancy tissue.

Without that hormonal signal, Bass said, a higher dose of misoprostol is needed to empty the uterus. The usual side effects of nausea, diarrhea, chills and sometimes fevers can be more severe because of the higher dosage. And it may lead to more people needing to seek in-person follow-up care to fully remove all of the pregnancy tissue, which can cause infection if it stays in the uterus.

“A lot of the people who are using telehealth for their medication abortion are not necessarily in places where they can safely access that care,” Bass said. “So it is concerning that we might be relying more on a regimen that means that many more people needing to seek care.”

What are the details of the legal arguments?

Louisiana officials, including Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill, argue that the state is harmed by the 2023 telehealth policy because it undermines a state law banning abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with few exceptions that don’t include rape or incest. The state also challenged the Food and Drug Administration’s process in deciding to eliminate the in-person dispensing requirement, saying it was based on flawed or nonexistent data.

The state also said the rule has resulted in $92,000 in Medicaid bills from two women who went to the emergency room because of complications related to mifepristone in 2025. And the state says the rule harmed the other plaintiff in the case, Louisiana resident Rosalie Markezich, who said her ex-boyfriend ordered the medication online and pressured her into taking it. That wouldn’t have been possible if the medication had to be dispensed through an in-person visit, the state argues.

“The priority of safety supersedes the priority of access, and that is what ultimately, I believe, needs to be looked at directly,” Sarah Zagorski, senior director of public relations at Americans United for Life, told Stateline on Wednesday. The anti-abortion organization submitted a brief supporting Louisiana’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court this week.

The FDA’s response has been to try to dismiss the claims in part on the grounds that Louisiana doesn’t have standing to sue, but agency officials have also said they are in the middle of conducting a safety review of mifepristone and need more time.

GenBioPro and Danco Laboratories, two of the manufacturers of mifepristone, intervened as defendants in the case, which can happen when the party that is sued may not be willing to fully defend the case for various reasons.

The two companies argue that Louisiana does not have proper standing to sue because the state does not prescribe or use mifepristone and is an “unregulated party” as it relates to the 2023 telehealth provision. They also noted that the FDA reviewed 15 studies evaluating medication abortion outcomes for more than 55,000 patients before approving the rule, “all of which supported the safety and effectiveness of dispensing mifepristone by mail, courier, or through pharmacies.”

How does this compare to the 2023 case Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA?

Both lawsuits were designed to restrict access to mifepristone. The plaintiffs in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case included a group of anti-abortion doctors who said they would be harmed by having to care for people who took mifepristone. They also argued that the FDA’s approval of the drug was improper.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was involved in that case as well, and determined that the FDA should roll back its decision to ease restrictions on the drug, including the 2023 telehealth rule. But the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided in June 2024 that the Alliance plaintiffs didn’t have proper standing and sent it back to the lower court.

After that ruling, the attorneys general of Missouri, Idaho and Kansas stepped in as plaintiffs, and the case was transferred to Missouri’s U.S. district court, where it’s still pending.

The Louisiana case is more limited because it would strike down one provision of mifepristone regulation, noted Jenna Hudson, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights. The Alliance plaintiffs sought to revoke the drug’s approval altogether.

Stateline reporters Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org and Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.  

Three weeks after two right-wing groups demanded the repeal of a professional licensing board’s ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ clients of social workers and other therapists, Gov. Tony Evers sent a sharply worded reply.

In a Tuesday letter to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Family Action, Evers declared, “my administration has no intention of repealing Wisconsin’s conversion therapy ban.”

Evers asserted that the April 14 demand letter from the two groups was based on “a significant misreading” of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that threw parts of a Colorado ban on conversion therapy into question. 

Evers wrote that it was “disappointing” that the organizations support “a long-disavowed and outdated practice” that extensive research has shown to be ineffective and responsible for harms including depression, suicide, substance misuse, posttraumatic stress and anxiety.

“On the other hand, this should come as no surprise,” Evers wrote. “After all, bullying LGBTQ kids and Wisconsinites seems to be an important goal for Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Family Action.”

Purported to dissuade people from same-sex attractions and from gender dysphoria — which the American Psychiatric Association has defined as  “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity” — conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, has been widely discredited.

Conversion therapy is not limited to talk therapy. “Aversive techniques used in reparative therapies have included electric shock, physical violence, administration of emetics, and personal degradation and humiliation,” the American Academy of Nursing wrote in a 2015 statement opposing the practice.

The Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board published an updated professional code in April 2024 that declared “any intervention or method” used or promoted to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity to be “unprofessional conduct” that could subject a practitioner to professional discipline.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a March 31 ruling, sent a lawsuit challenging a Colorado law against conversion therapy back to lower federal courts. The ruling instructed the lower courts to apply “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds to the Colorado law because it seeks to “regulate speech based on viewpoint.”

In their demand letter, WILL and Wisconsin Family Action called on the Evers administration to repeal the ban in the Wisconsin therapists’ code. The letter declared that it was similar to the Colorado law and claimed that “the Supreme Court held that Colorado’s substantively identical statute was unconstitutional.”

Evers wrote that the demand “relies on a significant misreading of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision” and had “erroneously” characterized its findings. 

“First, the Court intentionally — and specifically — stopped short of striking down any applications of Colorado’s law,” Evers wrote. The high court instead remanded the case to the lower court to apply a “more searching scrutiny” to the law, he added. “Repeal before that occurs would be premature.”

Evers also wrote that the ruling “expressly held that heightened scrutiny applies only to certain applications of Colorado’s law, not the entire provision. Specifically, the case concerned only Colorado’s conversion therapy prohibition as it applied to talk therapy — not to other treatment, such as physical or medication interventions.”

Quoting the Court’s ruling, Evers wrote that the Colorado plaintiff, therapist Kaley Chiles, stated that “the statute has many valid applications. Indeed, [she] did not take issue with Colorado’s effort to ban what she herself calls ‘long-abandoned, aversive’ physical interventions. Instead, Ms. Chiles objected to Colorado’s law only as it applies to her talk therapy, therapy that involves no physical interventions or medications, only the spoken word.”

Wisconsin’s professional rule also covers more than talk therapy, Evers wrote, and the therapy, counseling and social work board “will maintain the rule and continue to enforce its valid applications, in order to protect Wisconsinites from harmful and offensive practices by Board licensees.”

WILL’s initial response Thursday to a request for comment was a two-word email message from WILL Deputy Counsel Rebecca Furdek: “Lawsuit incoming.”

In a follow up statement, Furdek said that Evers was “resorting to personal, baseless attacks on WILL and its mission.” Contrary to the distinctions Evers made about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the statement reiterated WILL’s characterization that the Court found Colorado’s “substantively identical law amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”

Making no reference to other conversion therapy tactics, the statement concluded: “Government shouldn’t be deciding which viewpoints are ‘acceptable’ for Christian counselors to express when providing talk therapy to the individuals who voluntarily seek out faith-based counseling.”

In his letter, Evers wrote that because the Colorado case remains active in lower federal courts, the Department of Safety and Professional Services will attach a note to the conversion therapy rule stating that “certain instances of the unprofessional conduct” it refers to “are the subject of ongoing litigation.”

Wisconsin’s conversion therapy ban was enacted after several previous attempts were blocked by the Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules. A Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in July 2025 found that state laws the committee’s Republican majority used to review and suspend administrative rules were unconstitutional and encroached on the examining board’s legal authority.

Marc Herstand, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers Wisconsin chapter, praised Evers’ letter Thursday. The association was among the groups that urged the counseling board to add conversion therapy to practices considered unprofessional conduct. 

Wisconsin state law “clearly gives professions the authority to establish their own Conduct Code as the social work profession, along with the marriage and family therapy and professional counseling professions,  have done in classifying Conversion Therapy as unprofessional conduct,” Herstand said in an email message. 

“I applaud Governor Evers for his recognition of the severe harm that Conversion Therapy inflicts on LGBTQ children and his commitment to retain the ban on Conversion Therapy [in the professional code] to the maximum extent possible.”

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The day after the U.S. Supreme Court crippled the federal Voting Rights Act, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson addressed a virtual gathering for the group’s members and supporters where he ranked the landmark decision alongside the court’s most infamous cases.

Dred Scott excluded Black people from American citizenship ahead of the Civil War. Plessy blessed policies of racial segregation in 1896. And now there was Callais. 

The opinion will “probably go down in the history book as one of three of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of this nation,” Johnson said.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais on April 29 cleared states to split apart, for political gain, congressional districts where a majority of residents belong to minority groups. The court’s conservative majority said Louisiana lawmakers acted unconstitutionally when they intentionally created the state’s second majority-Black district, which the justices found unnecessary.

A week after its release, the decision is roiling politics across the South as states move at a rapid pace to recast the political landscape that has taken progressives by surprise. 

Republicans, triumphant over their victory at the court, are rushing fresh gerrymanders through Southern statehouses in time for the November midterm elections in an effort to strengthen their party’s control over the region’s U.S. House delegations. They’re acting at lightning speed, over loud protests, and have nullified votes by suspending ongoing elections.

Democrats, especially Black residents, are furious with both the court and GOP politicians, who they believe are poised to wipe away decades of Black political progress in the region. The new maps that seek to oust Black members of Congress and prevent the election of Democrats in the future recall a Jim Crow past of literacy tests and poll taxes, they say.

“We refuse to let you kill us by killing our vote,” Eliza Jane Franklin, a resident of rural Barbour County, Alabama, told a state House hearing Tuesday.

Decision kicked off legislative efforts

The Alabama Legislature is moving to authorize a special primary election using a congressional map currently blocked in federal court, if a district court or, ultimately, the Supreme Court allows the state to move forward. At least one of the state’s two Black members of the U.S. House would be vulnerable.

In Louisiana, the governor has suspended the state’s primary elections for the U.S. House, setting aside some 42,000 votes that were already cast. Republican lawmakers will begin advancing a new gerrymander in a matter of days, aiming to force out at least one of the state’s two Black House members.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new map into law Monday that aims to hand his party up to four additional U.S. House seats. State lawmakers approved the map hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. The map has already drawn multiple legal challenges.

The South Carolina Legislature is weighing whether to redraw maps. And Tennessee lawmakers want to gerrymander a Memphis district currently held by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who represents the state’s only majority-Black district. 

“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be color-blind,” Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday unveiling a plan to divide the Memphis area among three congressional seats.

More states, in the South and elsewhere, are expected to pursue new maps over the next two years. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp ruled out a special session this year, for example, but supports redistricting before the 2028 election. 

The current moment represents an extraordinary time in America, said Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group. But she also called it a reversion “back to America.”

Many thought the presence of Black, Hispanic and Asian American elected officials somehow meant racial discrimination no longer existed, she said.

“And unfortunately, that is a misread of American history,” Caruthers said. “And perhaps it is a retelling of American history for those who want to gloss over America’s very sordid past, especially when it comes to voting rights.”

Midterms impact

The scramble by a handful of Southern states to redraw districts comes as Republicans grasp for any scintilla of advantage ahead of the midterm elections in November. 

A U.S. House under Democratic control would spell the end of much of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, produce a wave of investigations into his administration and potentially lead to a vote to impeach him in the House, though the Senate would almost certainly acquit him.

“This is all about Donald Trump wanting to avoid hard questions and oversight hearings about his actions,” Cohen said at a news conference in Memphis.

Seth McKee, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University who has studied Southern politics, said Republicans are attempting to “staunch the bleeding” ahead of unfavorable midterm elections.

“The desperation of this Republican Party, it’s off the charts,” McKee said.

Redistricting push supercharged

Prior to Callais, Trump had already urged Republicans to redraw congressional maps for partisan advantage — a process that typically occurs once a decade after the census. 

Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas enacted more GOP-friendly maps, while Democrats struck back in California and Virginia. In Utah, Republicans want to block a court-ordered map that’s more favorable to Democrats.

Republican primary voters have given their approval to that approach. On Tuesday, five Trump-endorsed state legislative candidates in Indiana defeated GOP incumbents who had defied the president to block a gerrymander in the state last year.

But until now the Voting Rights Act limited how far that gerrymandering push could extend.

For decades, Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act helped protect majority-minority districts from gerrymandering and ensured voters could elect Black candidates to Congress in Southern states following the end of state laws that blocked Black citizens from voting. The Callais opinion guts Section 2 by curtailing the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps.

Republicans have praised the decision and many have been clear that they believe the opinion opens up a path to securing additional GOP seats. Trump has endorsed disregarding primary elections that have already been held so that states can pass new maps — which he predicts can net Republicans an additional 20 seats this fall.

“We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If they have to vote twice, so be it.”

Calls for GOP seats

Over the past week, some Republicans have cast majority-minority districts previously protected by the Voting Rights Act as racist because they were drawn with attention paid to the racial makeup of the map. U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, wrote on X that there are “no more excuses for keeping racist maps,” for example, and called for their immediate removal.

Other GOP leaders have centered their case for quick action on political power. Like Trump, they have explicitly invoked control of the U.S. House as a reason to gerrymander. While Republicans have the House, their margin of control is razor thin: 217 to 212, with one independent and five vacancies. Even a modest Democratic wave in November will likely sweep away GOP control.

Alabama Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger Jr. and House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said in a joint statement that the state’s lawmakers have a responsibility to offer Alabama a “fighting chance” to elect seven Republican U.S. representatives. Two of the state’s seven districts are held by Democrats.

“Control of the U.S. House of Representatives could come down to just a handful of seats, and when the dust settles, the people of Alabama will know that their Legislature stood firm, acted decisively, and did everything within its power to fight for fair representation,” Gudger and Ledbetter said.

Alabama Republicans want to use a map passed by lawmakers in 2023 that federal courts blocked from taking effect. Alabama’s current map was drawn by a court-appointed special master.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, asked a federal district court Tuesday for an order that would let the state move forward with the gerrymander.

In Louisiana, Republicans obtained special permission from the Supreme Court to quickly move forward on a new gerrymander after the justices struck down its current map in the Callais decision.

Absentee voting was already underway in Louisiana before Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended congressional primary elections set for May 16. Votes already cast for U.S. House candidates won’t count, Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, no relation, has said.

Louisiana state lawmakers are set to begin work on a new map this month that will likely break apart a New Orleans district held by U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat who has fought with the governor.

“The Court’s decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent of the decision to quickly finalize Callais.

Court challenges

Still, Democrats and other opponents of the gerrymandering effort across the South are turning to the courts. Lawsuits have also been filed challenging the suspension of Louisiana’s congressional primaries and Florida’s new map also faces court challenges.

A petition filed in Louisiana state court by Elias Law Group, a major Democrat-aligned voting rights litigation firm, alleges the governor’s decision to halt the congressional primary is unlawful and unprecedented. Only the state legislature has the power to set the state’s election schedule, the petition argues.

“Governors do not get to cancel elections by executive fiat, least of all elections that are already underway, with ballots in voters’ hands and votes already cast,” Lali Madduri, a partner at Elias Law Group, said in a statement.

Regardless of how the legal challenges play out, Democrats say the Callais decision and the ongoing fallout from the decision underscore the need for massive voter turnout in the November election. A large Democratic turnout that results in a significant Democratic majority in the U.S. House would serve as a rebuke to Trump’s gerrymandering campaign, they say.

Blue state gerrymanders

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina’s sole congressional Democrat, said during the NAACP virtual meeting that a Democratic House could pass voting rights legislation. 

“I would hope we could do that because I really think that’s our only hope legislatively,” Clyburn said.

Democrats have long called for the passage of a bill to restore preclearance, a major element of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court paused in 2013, which required states and local governments with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes. 

But the measure would face a certain filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Even if Democrats broke a filibuster, Trump would likely veto it. 

In effect, Democrats’ most realistic opportunity to enact major voting rights legislation relies on regaining control of the White House and Congress and ending the filibuster — a set of conditions that’s out of reach until at least 2029.

In the meantime, more Democrats are calling for aggressive gerrymandering of blue states as a way to punch back. U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Joseph Morelle, both New York Democrats, on Monday announced an initiative to encourage their state to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2028 election.

Gerrymandering New York would be an intensive effort, likely requiring voters to repeal or suspend anti-gerrymandering provisions in the state constitution. But voters in California and Virginia have previously endorsed Democratic gerrymanders.

“This is just the beginning,” Jeffries said in a statement. “Across the nation, we will sue, we will redraw and we will win.”

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.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary stay on an appeals court ruling from Friday that was blocking remote access to an abortion drug, restoring access until at least May 11.

The administrative stay, issued by Justice Samuel Alito, pauses Friday’s decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling blocked a 2023 rule adopted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowing mifepristone, one of two drugs used to terminate a pregnancy before 10 weeks and to treat miscarriages, to be prescribed without an in-person visit with a health care provider and also allowed it to be mailed to recipients in states with abortion bans.

“The administrative stay is temporary, and I am confident life and law will win in the end,” said Louisiana Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill in a statement. 

Thirteen states have near-total abortion bans, including Louisiana. Murrill sued the FDA in October, saying the rule undermines the state’s laws and causes financial harm because the state paid $92,000 in Medicaid bills for two women who needed emergency care in 2025 from complications related to mifepristone. 

In the years since the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing states to regulate abortion access, telehealth prescriptions of abortion medication have become increasingly popular, with more than 27% of all abortions provided that way in 2025, according to data from the Society of Family Planning.

“While this is a positive short-term development, no one can rest easy when our ability to get this safe, effective medication for abortion and miscarriage care still hangs in the balance,” said Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney for the Reproductive Freedom Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement. “The Supreme Court needs to put an end to this baseless attack on our reproductive freedom, once and for all.”

The case could follow a similar pattern to one that played out in 2023, after U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas issued a ruling that would have revoked access to the abortion drug mifepristone altogether. 

The U.S. Supreme Court intervened shortly after that ruling and kept mifepristone available while the case proceeded in the 5th Circuit appeals court, which eventually decided that more restrictions were warranted, but not pulling the drug’s approval. The Supreme Court officially took the case several months later, and unanimously ruled in June 2024 that the plaintiffs suing the FDA did not have standing, keeping access to mifepristone intact.

Responses from the attorneys in the latest case are expected to be filed with the Supreme Court by Thursday, according to Alito’s order.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org.

Early voting for the May 16 election began Saturday with confusion over whether all the races listed on the ballot are still taking place. 

Even motivated voters who showed up within the first few hours said they weren’t quite sure whether the U.S. House elections were still happening. 

“I went ahead and voted for who I wanted to vote for. If they don’t count it, that’s their problem,” said Betty Powers, who has participated in every election since 1968, outside an East Baton Rouge Parish polling location. 

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the U.S. House races Thursday, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s House district map unconstitutional. 

Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, who is not related to the governor, has said votes cast in Louisiana’s U.S. House races won’t be counted. But that didn’t deter several early voters from picking a House candidate on their ballot anyway. 

“Something is delayed … but I don’t know if it affects East Baton Rouge Parish or not,” said Valerie Amato, who wore a shirt with the picture of President Donald Trump and the slogan ‘I’m still here’ to her polling location. She said she voted for a U.S. House candidate out of habit. 

Mail-in ballots with U.S. House races listed had already been sent out by the time the governor declared the election was off. Nancy Landry’s office also didn’t have enough notice to remove the affected candidates’ names from the ballots before in-person voting started. 

“[The House race] was still on there, so we voted for it,” said Evan Delahaye, a Baton Rouge resident who voted early with his brother.

“I am worried we’re going to have to vote twice,” he added. 

Pressure from the president

Gov. Landry’s move to postpone an election for a reason other than a natural disaster or health crisis is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, in Louisiana. 

The state has proceeded with U.S. House races after federal courts declared the voting districts unconstitutional in the past, most recently in 2022. Previously, officials agreed it was too close to the elections to change the map, and that new districts could wait until the following cycle two years later. 

But Landry and other Republican officials insist the Supreme Court decision from Wednesday is so sweeping in nature that it demands the aggressive action of calling off an election, even when absentee voting was already underway.

Trump is also putting pressure on GOP elected officials across the country to create as many Republican-leaning districts in Congress as possible before the end of the year to ensure the party maintains its advantage in the House.

The Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s current House map unconstitutional because it said state officials relied too heavily on the race of voters to draw its district boundaries. As a result, Landry and Republican legislators are expected to create a new map that would eliminate one, or both, of the state’s majority-Black districts. 

Calling off the current elections allows the governor and Republican state lawmakers to draw up new, more conservative U.S. House districts sooner.

A flurry of lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court attempting to stop the governor’s actions and keep Louisiana’s House races moving forward. So far, none have been successful, but more court decisions could be handed down in the next few days. 

In light of that uncertainty, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican whose contentious reelection campaign is on the same ballot, was among those who chose to still pick a candidate in a House race when he went to early vote this week. 

Cassidy said he wasn’t convinced a court would uphold Landry’s decision to call off the election and wanted to vote just in case.

The senator said he agreed with the Supreme Court ruling on the U.S. House districts, but he was uncomfortable with the decision to cancel those races less than 48 hours before early voting began.

“The way that the election has transpired, that has almost treated the voter with disrespect,” Cassidy said in an interview with reporters. “That’s confusing to voters … We should be serving the voter, not politicians.”

 

Responding to President Donald Trump’s pressure, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has called a special session to redraw the state’s U.S. House map as the party tries to eliminate the only Democratic-held seat in Memphis.

Lee is calling on state lawmakers to return to the state Capitol on May 5 to pass a new Tennessee U.S. congressional district map, less than two weeks after the state legislature wrapped its annual session.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that no longer requires Tennessee and other southern states to create majority-minority districts in their U.S. House and state legislature district maps.

Tennessee, with a Black population of around 16%, was previously required by the Voting Rights Act to draw at least one of its nine congressional districts as majority-minority, effectively helping Democrats hold on to a Memphis-based seat.

“We owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters,” said Lee in a news release. “After consultation with the Lt. Governor, Speaker of the House, Attorney General, and Secretary of State, I believe the General Assembly has a responsibility to review the map and ensure it remains fair, legal, and defensible.”

Lawmakers need to move fast to change the maps before the 2026 midterm elections, as Tennessee’s Congressional primaries will be held on Aug. 6. The qualifying deadline to run in those elections has already passed, and campaigns are in full swing

Republicans currently hold an 8-1 advantage in congressional seats over Democrats. Tennessee is a Republican stronghold that Trump won with around 64% of the vote in 2024. But if party representation were equally distributed without gerrymandering, Democrats would likely hold two or three of the state’s U.S. House seats.

The Republican advantage is even stronger in the state legislature. Republicans control 75% of the state House seats and 81% of the state Senate.

Tennessee Republicans in 2022 were legally able to eliminate a Democratic-held seat in Nashville by splitting it across three congressional districts. This led Democrats to lose the 5th district seat, which the party had held since the end of the 1870s Reconstruction era.

Tennessee U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor this year, shared a photo on social media of a map showing the GOP winning all nine congressional districts by large margins.

The Lookout, using the nonpartisan Dave’s Redistricting, was able to replicate a similar map to the one Blackburn proposed, but not with the same margins she posted. Based on the 2024 Presidential election, Republicans could achieve a 9-0 outcome, essentially cracking Nashville and Memphis, but would shrink their margins in almost every district.

The map created by the Lookout shows nine districts where Republicans won 60% of the vote based on the 2024 Presidential election. But now six districts would have Republican advantages of less than 12 percentage points, compared to the current two.

Blackburn’s map appears to be based on the 2024 presidential election margin, not the Republican percentage of the vote over 50%, which is how nonpartisan organizations like Cook Political Report rate districts.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

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Wisconsin will likely face limited immediate impact at both the legislative and congressional level from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that narrowed how the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge political maps. But it may make it easier for people to challenge school board and city council maps in court.

The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais raises the bar for voting rights challenges by requiring stronger evidence that race, rather than political considerations, drove how districts were drawn, and making it easier for states to defend maps on nonracial grounds. 

Dan Lennington, the managing vice president and deputy counsel at the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said the boundaries that could be most easily struck down as a result of the Wednesday ruling are those that were drawn explicitly for racial reasons. Some examples, he said, are the boundaries for Milwaukee city council districts and certain school districts.

Race is a common factor in drawing Milwaukee city council districts, though campaigns to add additional majority-minority districts haven’t always succeeded. 

For example, departing Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in December 2021 vetoed a proposed city council map because it didn’t include a third Latino-majority district, only for Mayor Cavalier Johnson to sign that same map several weeks later.

Lennington also pointed to state laws that use race as a factor to determine school district boundaries. One of those laws explicitly mentions “racial composition of the pupils” as a factor for drawing boundaries — a law that he said is now implicated by the Callais decision.

“If a plaintiff comes to us and says that they live in a district that’s been racially gerrymandered, we would take a very close look at that case,” he said.

Less likely impact on legislative and congressional level

There likely won’t be much impact in Wisconsin at the congressional district level because there’s just one majority-minority district in the state, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said ahead of the ruling. The 4th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, comprises much of Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs in Milwaukee County. 

Even if Section 2 of the VRA did not apply, he said, the district would likely stay much the same given the general principle of keeping communities intact. 

A decision like the one handed down, he said, “would open the door if line drawers wanted to break up that county or city in some way, but I think it would probably be challenged on other grounds.”

Challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional maps have often had more to do with partisan than racial line-drawing. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he wasn’t surprised by the federal decision but reiterated his call for new congressional maps, which he said unfairly gave Republicans a 6-2 seat advantage in a swing state.

But two recent court decisions in Wisconsin rejected challenges to the state’s congressional maps on the basis that they constitute an unconstitutional “anti-competitive” gerrymander. Those rulings focused not on race, but on whether courts can take up claims based on partisan advantage. 

Doug Poland, co-founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said this ruling could empower lawmakers to pursue partisan goals while making racial challenges harder to prove.

But because of Wisconsin’s demographics — a largely white state, with the most significant minority populations concentrated around the Milwaukee area — the state has run into Section 2 challenges far less often than southern states, he said.

“As a practical matter, this decision doesn’t have a big impact on Wisconsin at the moment,” he said. “That could change.”

There’s more at play among state legislative districts, Burden said. The state has nine majority-minority legislative districts, where a single minority group makes up over half of the population: seven in the Assembly and two in the Senate. Two other districts — one in each chamber — are minority influence districts, where combined minority populations make up a majority.

Democrats in Wisconsin have generally steered clear of breaking up minority districts to avoid violating the VRA, Burden said, but packing minority voters in one district sometimes costs them adjacent districts where they might have been competitive if the minority population was more evenly distributed. For that reason, there’s a history of Republicans supporting majority-minority districts in the state.

The issue has been a factor in recent redistricting fights. In March 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court initially selected Evers’ legislative maps, which created an additional majority-Black Assembly district. 

But while Evers argued this addition was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act, it drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. A Black Democratic legislator criticized the move as diluting Black voices, while Republicans appealed the maps to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the GOP and ordered the Wisconsin Supreme Court to select a different map.

If any of the districts are found to be out of compliance with the U.S. Constitution under the ruling via some additional challenge, Burden said, Wisconsin may draw new districts sooner than later.

“I don’t know who that advantages,” he said. “It probably depends who’s drawing the lines.”

Lennington also pointed out President Donald Trump’s success with Black and Latino voters relative to past GOP candidates, adding that splitting majority-minority legislative districts wouldn’t necessarily give either party an advantage here.

What he did predict, though, is that splitting such districts “might polarize us even more” if they were replaced with districts drawn on partisan as opposed to racial lines.

“It just might make the red more red and the blue more blue,” he said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin will likely see limited, local effects from Voting Rights Act ruling — at least for now is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

After the U.S. Supreme Court severely weakened the federal Voting Rights Act in an April 29 decision, a furious U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries condemned what he called an “illegitimate” conservative majority on the court.

“This isn’t even the Roberts Court,” Jeffries said, referring to Chief Justice John Roberts. “It’s the Trump Court.”

Democrats are renewing their calls to overhaul the Supreme Court in the wake of the court’s decision, which empowers states to gerrymander congressional maps in ways that will break apart districts where a majority of residents are Black, Hispanic or belong to other minority groups. 

The momentous opinion overturned the reasoning behind decades of court cases that relied on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law born of efforts to stamp out Jim Crow voting laws in the South, to protect these majority-minority districts.

For years, critics of the court, where conservatives enjoy a 6-3 majority, have pushed for changes. Those efforts often center on expanding the size of the court to dilute the influence of the majority or imposing term limits on the justices, though other ideas, like narrowing the kinds of cases the court can consider, have also been discussed.

But the April 29 decision seems to be the last straw for some Democrats and progressives, though they are unlikely to be able to force any of the changes on their wishlist — at least for a long time. 

After rulings in recent years that ended the federal right to an abortion and handed President Donald Trump sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution while in office, they are fed up with a court they view as unmoored from the law and ruling based on politics.

“We cannot protect voting rights, civil rights or the environment as long as we have a Supreme Court majority that is captured by MAGA authoritarians,” Doug Lindner, senior director of judiciary and democracy at the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, told reporters on Thursday. “We need to take back our Supreme Court.”

Any effort to impose significant changes at the court will encounter stiff Republican opposition. GOP lawmakers have praised the court’s latest decision and some see long-serving Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as conservative icons. Unless Democrats win 60 seats in the Senate or eliminate the filibuster, Congress is highly unlikely to pass a major overhaul.

Republicans have denounced past proposals to change the court. After President Joe Biden proposed 18-year terms for justices and other changes in July 2024, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the plan “would tilt the balance of power and erode not only the rule of law, but the American people’s faith in our system of justice.”

No action under Biden

Supreme Court reform has long percolated as an issue among Democrats and progressives, but picked up steam during the 2020 presidential primary campaign. 

The court’s ideological makeup had already moved toward conservatives after Justice Anthony Kennedy, often a swing vote on key decisions, retired in 2018 and was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative. Republicans then cemented a firm 6-3 majority on the court in the fall of 2020 after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, died and was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Campaigning for president, then-candidate Biden voiced support for a presidential commission that would study court reform. After winning election, Biden named a blue ribbon panel of law professors, former judges and other lawyers, which issued a final report in December 2021.

The commission’s report stopped short of endorsing structural changes. It took no position on expanding the size of the court from nine members, citing “profound disagreement” among commission members over the idea. The commission also adopted no stance on term limits for justices.

The report was essentially put on a shelf — Biden made no serious effort to advance a court overhaul, though he later proposed some reforms after ending his campaign for reelection.

Public opinion dropping

Americans’ view of the Supreme Court has been falling. An August 2025 Pew Research Center survey found 48% of Americans hold a favorable view of the court, a 22-percentage point drop from August 2020.

A survey released in September 2025 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found 69% support for term limits but only 31% support for expanding the size of the court.

Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University and the executive director of the Emmet J. Bondurant Center for Constitutional Law, Practice and Democracy, said past courts would have been responsive to the prospect of legislation, but the current court isn’t swayed by public opinion.

In some cases the court tries to preserve its legitimacy by giving the other side a win, Segall said, but in general the court’s decisions since 2018, when Kennedy retired, can be explained by viewing the court as a subset of the Republican Party.

“This court is defined by the Republican Party,” he said.

Segall has called for dividing the court evenly between conservative and liberal appointees. An evenly-split court would encourage greater compromise among the justices, he contends. He also supports expanding the court and term limits if possible. But he bluntly predicted court reform wouldn’t happen in his lifetime.

“If Democrats have the power to do it, they won’t do it,” Segall said.

Action unlikely, at least in short term

Jeffries, who will likely become U.S. House speaker if Democrats retake the chamber in the November midterm elections, said this week that “everything was on the table” in terms of the Supreme Court.

“In the new Congress, we’re going to have to do something about this Supreme Court,” Jeffries told the MeidasTouch Network.

Rep. John Rose, a Tennessee Republican, said on social media that Jeffries’ comments show that Democrats are preparing to “nuke the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court the second they’re back in power.”

Trump and some Republicans in Congress, convinced Democrats will end the filibuster to pass priorities like Supreme Court reform, want Republicans to end the filibuster first and enact a host of conservative priorities before the party potentially loses control of the Senate following the November elections.

But even if Democrats end the filibuster, the party faces a steep climb to changing the court unless it retakes control of Congress and the White House. That means any major overhaul almost certainly wouldn’t become law until at least 2029.

Trump’s response

Trump has had a turbulent relationship with the court but would be virtually certain to veto legislation remaking it while he remains in office.

While the justices have protected Trump and future presidents from criminal prosecution for actions taken as part of their presidential duties, they struck down his sweeping worldwide tariffs as illegal, dealing a major blow to one of his signature policies. They also refused to hear legal challenges that sought to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss.

Still, Trump scoffed on Thursday at Democratic hopes to remake the court in the future. He accused the party of wanting 21 justices on the court (Democratic-sponsored plans in recent years have called for 13 or 15 justices). He also called Jeffries’ comments a “dangerous statement.”

“Hakeem Jeffries said the Supreme Court is illegitimate,” Trump said Thursday. “That’s a rough statement.”

By Zara Norman/Medill News Service

WASHINGTON — John Bailey said he’s saved tens of thousands of dollars over the last decade by relying on a generic prescription to lower his cholesterol.

The 68-year-old from central Texas was able to get a generic because the patent on a brand-name medication expired. He and many other Americans worried that a case the U.S. Supreme Court heard April 29 could restrict access to generic drugs more broadly.

“It’s probably going to make a difference in how much we pay,” Bailey said while sightseeing near the court.

The case, Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc., will decide whether generic drug manufacturer Hikma infringed on a cardiovascular medication patented by Amarin when it marketed an unpatented use.

That practice, known as “skinny labeling,” is a key pathway that brings cheaper generic drugs to market sooner. The Journal of the American Medical Association found skinny labels were used by 43% of generics from 2015 to 2019. 

Should justices affirm the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s 2024 ruling for Amarin, experts warned it could have a chilling effect on the generic industry writ large, which would seriously hike up drug costs.

“It would mean that the monopoly prices of prescription drugs that are currently being paid right now have no end to them,” Charles Duan, a patent lawyer who wrote a “friend-of-the-court” brief in favor of Hikma, told Medill News Service in an interview ahead of oral arguments.

For consumers, higher prices would be untenable. Six in 10 US adults are already worried about the affordability of their prescription drugs, per a March Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Drug prices fall with an increasing number of generic competitors, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Issue is narrow, drugmaker says

The case deals with an issue that policymakers have debated for decades: whether federal policy should encourage drug companies to develop new products by giving them monopoly control for a certain number of years, or seek to make drugs more affordable by shortening the monopoly window.

Amarin argued to the court  that the case hinges on a narrow regulatory matter that would have neither a bearing on skinny labels, nor on the 1984 law that established a framework for cheaper drug manufacturing.

Tegan Berry, a spokesperson for Amarin, said in an email drugmakers would lose their business purpose for research if the company loses the case.

“The broad safe harbor Hikma seeks for skinny labels will eviscerate financial incentives for research into new uses for existing drug treatments,” Berry wrote. 

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed wary of how a finding for Amarin could impact the industry writ large. Kavanaugh in particular emphasized that the 1984 law balanced innovation with affordability, and ensured the skinny label pathway was codified.

Kavanaugh cited a brief written for Hikma by former U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who was one of that statute’s principal authors, saying the Federal Circuit’s decision threatened to “undermine” the generic pharmaceutical industry.

The brief “points out, you know, generics have saved $3.4 trillion over the past 10 years, but the Federal Circuit’s decision leaves generic drug companies in the dark about what might expose them to liability,” Kavanaugh said while questioning Michael Huston, the attorney representing Amarin. “That’s going to have some serious implications market-wide.”

Generics expand access

The concern for generic manufacturers is the threat of infringement lawsuits will force them to wait until patents expire to bring drugs to market, rather than trying sooner with one unpatented use.

“Generic companies won’t choose that pathway if, at best, it means paying millions in legal fees and, at worst, a massive damages award,” Charles Klein, the attorney representing Hikma, said during arguments.

“The risk of liability and what it could do to a generic, I would think, would be pretty significant,” Jackson said while questioning Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart.

Some experts were concerned that a decision for Amarin could impact other generic products, not just pharmaceuticals.

“Drugs are obviously sort of the poster child here, because they’re so expensive and people are very concerned about drug prices,” Duan said. “But this is not a case that’s specific about drugs. In that sense, it’s really a case about whether or not generic products can exist.”

Generic products can seriously save consumers. Store-brand foods cost up to 40% less than name brand items at Wegman’s and Stop & Shop, a 2022 CNET study found. Any savings go a long way — food prices rose 2.7% from March 2025 to 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor.

Justices are not expected to issue a decision in the case until near the of their term in early July, either to dismiss Amarin’s complaint or send it back to trial court in Delaware. 

Already, Stewart warned the court, generic manufacturers will have a “substantial disincentive” for entering the market and are holding off now pending the court’s decision.

“This is a real test for how we want to balance innovation versus affordability in this country,” John Murphy, CEO of the advocacy group Association for Accessible Medicines, said. “We need to make sure that balance is more appropriately favored for consumers.”

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.

President Donald Trump on Thursday moved to capitalize on a U.S. Supreme Court decision weakening the federal Voting Rights Act as he urged one governor to gerrymander his state and praised another for suspending an approaching primary.

The court’s decision on Wednesday struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as unconstitutional and empowered other Republican states to break apart districts where most residents are Black for a partisan advantage.

The opinion could reinvigorate Trump’s push for states to redraw their maps to give Republicans an edge in the November midterm elections. The president’s party typically performs poorly in the midterms and Trump’s approval has fallen in polls, making Democrats hopeful they can retake the U.S. House.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry and state Attorney General Liz Murrill announced on Thursday that the state’s congressional primary election, set for mid-May, would be suspended. The pause gives state lawmakers time to draw a new map aimed at ousting at least one, if not two, Black Democrats.

Trump thanked Landry on his social media platform, Truth Social, for “moving so quickly to fix the Unconstitutionality” of the state’s map. In a separate post, Trump wrote that he had spoken with Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who faces calls to immediately gerrymander the state.

“I had a very good conversation with Governor Bill Lee, of Tennessee, this morning, wherein he stated that he would work hard to correct the unconstitutional flaw in the Congressional Maps of the Great State of Tennessee,” Trump wrote.

A spokesperson for Lee didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The redistricting rush 

Historically, states draw new maps once a decade after each census but eight states have now broken that norm after Trump urged Republicans to gerrymander. 

Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah have drawn fresh GOP-leaning maps, as well as Florida, whose legislature approved a gerrymander hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. California and Virginia have enacted new maps favorable to Democrats. 

Before Wednesday, the redistricting war was essentially a wash. But the court’s decision gives Republicans more options to gain the upper hand this year, if states can move quickly. 

Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee are among the red states with upcoming primaries where lawmakers could theoretically still act. In some states — like Georgia and Tennessee — top Republicans haven’t ruled out action. In others, like Alabama and Georgia, GOP leaders have ruled out or played down the possibility of action this year.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, urged states to gerrymander their maps before the midterm elections.

“I think all states that have unconstitutional maps should look at that very carefully and I think they should do it before the midterms,” Johnson told CNN on Thursday. 

Dems also talk gerrymandering

Democrats have also floated the possibility of additional gerrymanders — whether this year or ahead of the 2028 election. 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said on social media after the court’s decision that she would work with the legislature to change the state’s redistricting process. New York currently uses a commission system to draw maps, limiting opportunities for partisan gerrymandering.

At a news conference hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus on Wednesday, Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat, suggested she would support additional Democratic gerrymanders.

“It values partisan politics over discrimination,” Sewell said of the court’s decision. “It’s really, really, really — I mean, it takes us back. So to the extent it’s urging, it’s inviting red states to totally take away all of the Democratic seats and be totally red, it also encourages blue states to do exactly the same.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act sent Black Democrats in the U.S. House reeling on Wednesday, as they confronted a new reality where Republicans could gerrymander some of them out of office and limit the ability of Black voters to elect candidates in the future.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus vowed to fight the court’s decision. They demanded fresh votes on federal voting rights legislation that has languished for several years and urged voters to turn out in the November election.

But facing a Republican-controlled Congress for at least the rest of the year and a Republican White House for at least the next two-and-a-half years, the prospect of major new voting rights legislation becoming law appears slim in the near term.

“It will pave the way for the greatest reduction in representation for Black and minority voters since the years following Reconstruction,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat, said of the court’s decision, referring to the post-Civil War period in the South.

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. 

As of Aug. 4, 2025, Congress included 61 Black members of the House, including two delegates, and five senators, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Racial gerrymander

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because it unnecessarily created a second district where a majority of residents are Black.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act had previously limited states from using maps that dilute the voting power of minority citizens. Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent that the decision would now allow states to dilute the voting power of minority voters without legal consequences.

Republicans welcomed the decision, with many saying race should play no role in redistricting. President Donald Trump, informed about the ruling by reporters and told that it would help Republicans, exclaimed, “I love it.”

Florida lawmakers approved a new map within hours of the opinion. The proposal, offered by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this week, seeks to secure four additional House seats for Republicans. DeSantis had invoked the court’s decision, even before it was released, to push lawmakers to pass the new map.

GOP candidates and officials in other states urged state lawmakers to move quickly to redraw maps, even with primary elections approaching. Even if only a small number of states enact fresh gerrymanders this year, the Supreme Court decision will likely trigger another, bigger wave of redistricting over the next two years ahead of the 2028 election.

“The Court rightly acknowledged that the South has made extraordinary progress, and that laws designed for a different era do not reflect the present reality,” Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.

Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement said the decision “restores fairness, strengthens confidence in our elections, and ensures every voter is treated equally under the law.”

The Supreme Court in 2019 allowed states to redraw maps for political advantage, ruling that federal courts would no longer adjudicate partisan gerrymandering cases. That previous decision, combined with Wednesday’s opinion, offers states a wide berth to draw maps that limit the voting power of minorities if they’re sold as politically necessary.

Bloody Sunday

Sewell represents a district that includes Selma, where the civil rights activist and future U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., along with other marchers, was beaten by state troopers in 1965 while walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an episode called Bloody Sunday. 

The beatings helped spur Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act later that year — the same law the Supreme Court weakened on Wednesday.

“The court just gave states permission to use partisan gerrymandering as a wholesale excuse to deny Black and minority voters a voice in our democracy,” Sewell said.

In Missouri, the Republican-controlled legislature earlier this year passed a map intended to oust Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who was Kansas City’s first Black mayor. The state Supreme Court is weighing a legal challenge that could keep the map from taking effect before the November election.

On Wednesday, Cleaver in a statement called the opinion “deeply disrespectful of the generations of African Americans and civil rights advocates who gave their freedom, their blood, and even their lives to make it possible.” 

Obama criticizes ruling

Former President Barack Obama condemned the decision as another example of how a majority of the current Supreme Court seems intent on “abandoning its vital role” in ensuring equal participation in American democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.

“The good news is that such setbacks can be overcome,” Obama said in a statement. “But that will only happen if citizens across the country who cherish our democratic ideals continue to mobilize and vote in record numbers – not just in the upcoming midterms or in high profile races, but in every election and every level.

Several Democrats said Congress should pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a Democratic-sponsored measure that seeks to restore preclearance — a requirement that states with a history of discrimination obtain federal approval before making voting changes. The Supreme Court effectively halted preclearance in 2013.

The House, under Democratic control, passed the legislation in 2021 but it stalled in the Senate. Democrats could likely pass the bill again if they retake the House in November but would face a likely filibuster again in the Senate. Even if they managed to pass the bill, Trump would be virtually certain to veto it.

Rep. Cleo Fields, a Louisiana Democrat whose district was ruled an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, sought to place the court’s decision in a broader, historical context. 

Looking ahead to midterms

Recalling Louisiana’s Jim Crow past, he said the state used to require individuals to recite the Constitution’s preamble before registering to vote.

“If you tell me I’ve got to jump a certain height, I could probably do that. Tell me I’ve got to run a certain distance, I could probably do that, too. But if you tell me I have to be white to serve in Congress from Louisiana, I can’t do nothing about that — I need some help from my government,” Fields said, adding that’s why Congress needs to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the Supreme Court’s conservative majority “illegitimate” and said the opinion was unacceptable but not unexpected. 

While acknowledging the decision represents a setback, America has an opportunity to mount a comeback in the upcoming election, he said.

Jeffries, who is set to become speaker if Democrats retake the House in November, said one of the chamber’s first actions would be to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“So we can end the era of voter suppression in America once and for all,” Jeffries said.

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court appeared poised Wednesday to uphold the Trump administration’s efforts to end temporary legal protections for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. 

The decision could also affect several other lawsuits related to what is known as Temporary Protected Status that are pending in lower courts. The suits challenge the Trump administration’s procedures to terminate country protections, which have sharply raised deportation risks for more than 1 million immigrants. 

So far, the Trump administration has ended TPS destinations for 13 countries, out of 17 that were active at the start of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said that federal courts, under the law, cannot review the executive branch’s decision to end or extend a TPS designation.

“They challenge the very kind of foreign policy-laden judgments that are traditionally entrusted to the political branches,” Sauer said of TPS recipients who are suing to remain in the United States. 

But two lawyers, Ahilan Arulanantham, representing Syrians, and Geoffrey Pipoly, representing Haitians, argued that their clients could challenge a lack of proper procedure that then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took in ending those TPS designations. 

That would include not undertaking a review of country conditions before making a determination, the lawyers said.

Most of the questioning came from the three liberal justices, who grilled Sauer and pressed him on Trump’s racist remarks disparaging Haitians.

The conservative justices, who hold a 6-3 majority, asked Sauer only a handful of questions, and seemed skeptical of Arulanantham and Pipoly’s argument, signaling that they may already agree with the Trump administration’s position that the courts cannot review TPS terminations. 

A decision is not expected until June or early July. Both cases would go back to the lower courts to continue on the merits argument. 

But if the Supreme Court agrees with the Trump administration, then TPS holders from Haiti and Syria could be subject to deportation. 

The effort to end TPS designation is part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to curtail immigration and strip legal status for people, creating thousands of newly unauthorized immigrants in order to subject them to his mass deportation drive.

How TPS works

TPS is a humanitarian program that Congress created in 1990 to allow for temporary protections for nationals who hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, disasters or other extreme circumstances. 

TPS holders must go through vetting to be approved for work permits and legal protections. Each renewal lasts from six to 12 to 18 months. 

Those determinations are up to the Department of Homeland Security secretary, who typically consults with the State Department to evaluate country conditions and determine if the status needs to be extended. Decisions would depend upon whether conditions are still unsafe for a migrant’s return.

Sauer argued that the courts cannot review that final decision, including procedural ones that lead up to it. 

Arulanantham contended that position is a “double edged sword.” Another administration could easily come in and a new DHS secretary could theoretically use TPS to give legal status to immigrants in the country unlawfully, and that decision would not be subject to review by the courts, Arulanantham said.

The TPS holders before the Supreme Court argue that Noem did not consult with the appropriate agencies, such as the State Department, before deciding to end TPS designation. They say she did not follow proper procedure — but they are not challenging that a decision to terminate a country can be reviewed. 

Arulanantham said with Syria, if Noem had reviewed the State Department’s report, which advises people not to travel to the country because of armed conflict, and still decided against renewing protections, that decision is not reviewable. 

“What is reviewable is whether she actually asks anything and gets any information about country conditions,” he said. 

Sauer said that legal argument was “meritless,” because the TPS “statute does not micromanage the degree of consultation with other agencies.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Arulanantham why a challenge to the review of how a TPS termination is ended would even matter.

“If it’s just kind of a box-checking exercise, I mean, why would Congress permit review of the procedural aspect, when really what everybody cares about much more is the substance?” she asked.

Arulanantham said it’s “because Congress … and the millions of people who live with TPS, have some faith in government, and they believe that if there is consultation, the decisions will be better.”

He said, “Our view is that even if it comes back like a box-checking exercise, people will at least know that somebody talked to somebody else.”

Trump ‘racial animus’ cited

Pipoly argued that the ending of TPS for Haiti was based on racial animosity toward Haitians, pointing to the president’s own words where he referred to the Caribbean island as a “shithole.” 

“The true reason for the termination is the president’s racial animus towards non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular,” he said. 

Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Sauer about those comments from Trump. 

“We have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a ‘filthy, dirty and disgusting s-hole country,’ I’m quoting him, and where he complained that the United States takes people from such countries, instead of people from Norway, Sweden or Denmark,” she said. “I don’t see how that one statement is not a prime example of … showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”

Sauer argued that none of those statements “mentions race or relates to race,” and instead the president was referring to “problems like crime, poverty, welfare dependence.”

In the lower court that blocked the Trump administration from ending TPS for Haiti, federal Judge Ana Reyes found that there was racial animosity in the government’s decision to end the humanitarian protections. 

This is not the first time Trump has tried to end TPS for Haiti — he did so in his first administration in 2018, but was blocked by the courts.

Haitian workers in the US

The day before Wednesday’s oral arguments, a handful of Democratic lawmakers gathered with domestic care advocates outside the U.S. Capitol to stress the importance of TPS workers. More than 20,000 Haitians work in healthcare, according to the immigration advocacy group FWD.us.

“At this moment, over 1 million people are at risk of being removed from their homes, separated from their families, having their lives uprooted because of Trump’s cruel and unlawful attempt to terminate their temporary protected status,” Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley said during the Tuesday press conference. 

Pressley said that thousands of TPS holders serve as essential workers, including one recipient from Haiti who took care of the congresswoman’s mother, who died from cancer.

“It was Haitian nurses who prayed over my mother, who sang songs to my mother, who oiled her scalp lovingly and braided her hair,” Pressley said. “Everyone who calls this country home benefits from TPS, and stands to be harmed by this termination.”

Pressley has led the bipartisan push in the House to approve a measure that would extend TPS for Haiti up to three years. 

Ten Republicans, including one independent who caucuses with the GOP, joined Democrats in approving the bill earlier this month. 

While it passed in the House, the legislation would need 60 votes in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. Additionally, if Congress managed to pass the bill, it would likely be rejected by Trump. 

“We are demanding the Supreme Court uphold the law, save lives and protect our communities,” Pressley said. “To send vulnerable families to countries like Haiti, Venezuela and Syria that are enduring horrific humanitarian crises is unconscionable, shameful, unlawful and preventable.”

The U.S. Supreme Court could be ready to overturn a Missouri state court verdict that favored a man who sued the manufacturer of the popular herbicide Roundup for lacking any warning that the product carried a risk of cancer after oral arguments in the case Monday.

The arguments focused on whether states could enforce their own labeling requirements of pesticides, or whether federal law preempted any deviation among states. Members of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority emphasized the need for uniformity across the country.

The U.S. Department of Justice intervened in the case in favor of Monsanto, the Missouri-based company that manufactures Roundup and has been owned since 2018 by German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The company faces thousands of lawsuits claiming exposure to Roundup increased a risk of cancer and that the company failed to warn consumers when it reasonably should have known of the risk.

Monsanto denies that the product causes cancer, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has consistently agreed.

John Durnell, a St. Louis resident, sued the company in 2019 claiming that exposure to Roundup over two decades led to his developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. A Missouri trial court awarded him $1.25 million, and appeals courts affirmed the ruling.

But the Supreme Court, which is the first federal court to hear the case, seemed inclined to protect federal supremacy. The EPA, which regulates labeling requirements for herbicides, does not require the kind of warning the Missouri jury said was appropriate.

Federal law typically trumps state law, which Monsanto and the Justice Department emphasized Monday. Industry groups across the economy tend to support federal supremacy because it saves companies from complying with 50 separate regulatory schemes across states.

‘Is that uniformity?’

An exchange between Ashley Keller, the attorney for Durnell, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom President Donald Trump appointed in his first term, may hold the key to the court’s ultimate ruling.

Keller argued that Congress in the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, which governs herbicide use, did not include a clause to expressly say that the federal law would preempt any state claims.

There was no issue of a difference between state and federal law, Keller said. Instead, a particular jury decided a single case based on unique facts, he continued. Different juries in other cases may have decided differently.

But Kavanaugh seemed not to accept that argument. He rephrased a similar question several times, and, even as Keller objected, appeared to dismiss the idea that the Missouri verdict was compatible with a national standard.

“You think it’s uniformity when each state can require different things?” he asked.

Keller rejected that framing. 

“The label’s illegal in one state and legal in another state,” Kavanaugh responded. “That’s uniformity?” 

Keller said he didn’t agree with that premise either, saying the label is not illegal based on the state but based on the facts presented at trial and the jury’s interpretation.

“The label subjects you to liability in one state and does not subject you to liability in another state,” Kavanaugh continued. “Is that uniformity?”

“I don’t think it’s state by state,” Keller said. “I think it’s jury by jury.”

Paul Clement, a well-known conservative appeals lawyer, represented Monsanto in the case, and described Keller’s argument as chaotic. It would not just open up separate regulatory regimes in each state in the country, but subject manufacturers to liability based on the makeup of any particular batch of citizens on a state court jury.

“It’s worse than 50 states,” he said. “It’s every jury is a new day.” 

A host of agencies in countries across the globe have all done studies on glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, Clement said.

“It’s probably the most, like, studied herbicide in the history of man, and they’ve all reached the conclusion based on more data and the kind of expert analysis they can do that there isn’t a risk here,” he said. “You shouldn’t let a single Missouri jury second-guess that judgment.”

Liberal justices seek consumer protections

The court’s liberal justices spent more time questioning why states shouldn’t be allowed to enforce stricter regulations.

Justice Elena Kagan asked Principal Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris, who argued on behalf of the federal government in favor of throwing out the verdict against Monsanto, if she agreed with Clement’s argument.

Harris said she largely agreed, noting that 50 states setting up separate regulations on labeling pesticides would cause confusion.

But Kagan asked why uniformity should be a higher goal than safety, saying a certain state government might have a better understanding than the EPA.

“It does undermine uniformity, I appreciate that,” Kagan said. “On the other hand, if it turns out that they (state regulators) were right, it might have been good if they had an opportunity to do something to call this danger to the attention of the people while the federal government was going through its process.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also pointed out that the EPA only registers herbicides once every 15 years, meaning that states might have better information than the EPA, especially later in that cycle.

“Lots of things can happen in science in terms of developments about the product,” she told Clement. “So if the product can become misbranded because of new information, I guess I’m just wondering why you think that you couldn’t have a situation where it would be perfectly rational for either the EPA or the states to bring to the attention of that manufacturer this new information and process a claim related to it.”