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CASE BEFORE SUPREME COURT COULD DESTROY VOTING RIGHTS ACT AND CEMENT
GOP CONTROL OF HOUSE ‘FOR AT LEAST A GENERATION’  
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Stephen Prager
October 15, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ If the court dismantles Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and
allows overtly racist gerrymanders, one report estimates that
Republicans will be virtually guaranteed an additional 19 seats in the
2026 midterms. _

Activists and participants gather in front of the Supreme Court of
the United States while it hears arguments in Louisiana v. Callais on
October 15, 2025, in Washington, DC., (Photo by Jemal Countess/ Legal
Defense Fund)

 

The US Supreme Court reheard a case on Wednesday that could strike a
death blow to the Voting Rights Act and, in the process, virtually
guarantee that Republicans hang on to power in the 2026 midterm
elections and well into the future.

At issue in the case, _Louisiana v. Callais
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which outlaws racially discriminatory redistricting. Max Flugrath,
communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action,
wrote for _Slate_
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“by taking the unusual step of reopening arguments, legal experts
believe, the court’s far-right majority may have telegraphed its
intent to dismantle Section 2.”

“If it falls, the impact will reverberate far beyond Louisiana,
reshaping political power across the entire country,” he said.

According to a report
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Fair Fight and Black Voters Matter, if Section 2 is dismantled, it
would guarantee Republicans an additional 19 safe seats in the US
House of Representatives, and as many as 27 when combined with the
GOP’s Trump-led push for mid-decade gerrymandering
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“It’s enough to cement one-party control of the US House for at
least a generation,” according to the report.

The origins of the case
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are highly unusual. It began typically enough, with a conservative
Fifth Circuit Court affirming a lower court’s ruling that the
congressional maps drawn by the state GOP in 2022 constituted an
illegal racial gerrymander. Despite Black residents making up roughly
a third of Louisiana’s population, many of them were crammed into a
single district, while the other five in the state remained majority
white.

After the court ruling, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry convened an
emergency legislative session to draw new maps that complied with the
court’s order and granted another majority-Black district. But
shortly after the map was finalized, it was challenged by a group of
white voters, who alleged that by drawing new maps that gave Black
voters fairer representation, Louisiana’s legislature was
effectively enacting an illegal racial gerrymander against voters who
are _not _Black.

“Their logic twists the 14th and 15th Amendments—which were
themselves created to protect voting rights—in an attempt to destroy
them,” Flugrath said. “The argument should have been laughed out
of court. Instead, a lower court embraced it, and an appeal was
accepted by the Supreme Court.”

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the new case in March,
but—in an extraordinarily rare move—chose not to issue a ruling.
Instead, it punted the case to its next term in October, directing the
parties involved to center their arguments on the question of whether
the Fifth Circuit’s requirement for the legislature to create a
second majority-minority district violated the 14th or 15th
Amendments.

Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, told
the _Louisiana Illuminator_
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it was “an ominous question” for the court to pose because it
would allow for states to carry out racially motivated redistricting
while removing the legal framework to counter them.

The Supreme Court rejected
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claims of discrimination against white people in the 2022 _Allen v.
Milligan_ case out of Alabama, which the court decided 5-4 with
conservative Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joining the
three liberals to uphold section 2.

However, Kavanaugh signaled
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he may be willing to side with such arguments in different
circumstances. He noted in his concurring opinion that he agreed with
a point made by Justice Clarence Thomas
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that “even if Congress… could constitutionally authorize
race-based redistricting under Section 2 for some period of time, the
authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend
indefinitely into the future.”

As Matt Ford wrote for the _New Republic_
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July, “The temporal argument, as Kavanaugh phrased it, is
telling”:

In the mid-20th century, the federal government dismantled nearly all
of the legal architecture of Jim Crow racial apartheid in the American
South and elsewhere. Congress enacted powerful laws like the Voting
Rights Act that created new tools to challenge specific laws and
practices. The Supreme Court's liberal majority overturned past errors
like _Plessy v. Ferguson_, which entrenched _de jure_ racial
segregation, and breathed new life into the Reconstruction-era
amendments.

The Roberts Court is apparently unwilling to strike down those laws or
overturn those rulings on the merits—that is to say, they have yet
to rule that those civil rights efforts were unconstitutional in the
1950s or 1960s. Doing so would be tantamount to embracing Jim Crow
again. Instead, they have argued that the laws and rulings are no
longer permissible because they solved the problem, or at least have
done so sufficiently to render them unnecessary.

Assuming all the other conservatives stay the course, Kavanaugh alone
switching sides in the _Callais_ case would be enough to
functionally destroy Section 2.

If this does happen, Flugrath warned that “politicians who
gerrymander to silence voters of color will have a new defense: Fixing
racial discrimination is discrimination itself. It’s an Orwellian
logic that would make it nearly impossible to challenge unfair
maps—not just in Congress but in state legislatures, city councils,
and school boards across the country.”

“The result would essentially be a return to the pre-1965 Jim Crow
playbook, masked in pseudo-constitutional language,” he continued.
“If Section 2 falls, we could see an existential shift in power—a
system in which representation reflects not the will of the people but
the will of those in power. Congress would become insulated from
accountability, its makeup preserved by maps drawn to protect
incumbents.”

With oral arguments beginning Wednesday, protesters assembled outside
the Supreme Court, with signs bearing the image of the late civil
rights icons John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer. Dr. Press Robinson, who
has been part of the legal team arguing for fair maps in Louisiana
since 2022, said this case is a battle to maintain the legal equality
that those figures fought to secure.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees that communities of
color have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
It is one of the last remaining tools we have to protect against
racial discrimination in voting and ensure that historically silenced
voices are heard,” Robinson said in an op-ed
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the ACLU. “We need fair maps because they are the foundation of a
representative democracy. Without them, entire communities are
silenced because the game is rigged before it’s even started.”

_Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams._

* Voting Rights Act
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* Supreme Court
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* undemocratic
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* Racism
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