It’s considered a huge decision, and it’s considered to generally favor the GOP. But if you deeply understand the details of today’s SCOTUS decision on drawing districts on racial lines, my hat is off to you. I’ve read four or five articles on the subject and I must humbly say the details are still somewhat opaque to me.

Anyway:

… [T]he Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the scope of a key Voting Rights Act provision that restricts how states draw districts affecting minority voters, constraining states’ use of race as a factor when drawing congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Justices ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which was redrawn to create a second majority-Black district, constituted an “illegal” racial gerrymander. The court’s decision sharply narrows states’ use of race as a factor when drawing their congressional districts, effectively watering down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in question designed to protect minority voters.

Pretty straightforward. And maybe that’s all ye need to know. But then there’s this sort of thing:

The case, Louisiana v. Callais, centered on whether Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map, which had added a second majority-Black district, amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Though the justices acknowledged that compliance with the Voting Rights Act can be considered by states as a compelling interest in redistricting, they said that it did not require Louisiana to add the creation of a second, majority Black district, siding with a lower court that had also blocked the state’s use of the map.

So obviously something changed in the interpretation of “racial gerrymander.” What was it that made Louisiana think it was in compliance, and what changed in the definition to make it non-compliant? Something narrowed down, but what?

SCOTUSblog has a lot more information, for example:

The decision was the latest, and presumably final, chapter in a long-running dispute arising from Louisiana’s efforts to adopt a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. The first map that the state adopted, in 2022, had one majority-Black district out of the six allotted to the state. A group of Black voters – who comprise roughly one-third of the state’s population – went to federal court, where they alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits discrimination in voting.

A federal judge agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that ruling. It instructed Louisiana to draw a new map by January 2024 or risk having the court adopt one for it.

The map that Louisiana drew in 2024 created a second majority-Black district, leading to the election in November of that year of Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s.

The map also prompted the lawsuit leading to Wednesday’s opinion. It was filed by a group of “non-African American” voters who contended that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by sorting voters based on race. A three-judge federal district court agreed with them and barred the state from using the 2024 map in future elections, but a divided Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling in May 2024.

The Supreme Court took up the case and heard oral arguments for the first time in March 2025. Defending the 2022 map, Louisiana contended that once the lower courts determined that the 2022 map was likely invalid and ordered it to adopt a new map with a second majority-Black district, its focus was not on race but on creating a map that would protect the state’s powerful Republican incumbents in Congress, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee.

The “non-African American” voters challenging the 2024 map told the justices that it was “utterly implausible” that both race and politics were equally responsible for the 2024 map.

I know that SCOTUS doesn’t forbid politically partisan gerrymandering; it allows states to do that. But it is willing to step in when racial gerrymandering is involved. It seems to me that, in this case, the defenders of the new black district’s creation were arguing that the district had been drawn for mere partisan political purposes, and today the SCOTUS majority didn’t buy the argument and said the reason was race rather than politics.

Race and politics are intertwined, of course, for example in the sense that black Americans overwhelmingly vote Democrat. So it’s not always easy to tease out the relative balance between the two in terms of the motive for the creation of districts. I assume that often it’s both reasons.

The SCOTUSblog article goes into a lengthy and complex discussion of how something called the Gingles test is applied. This is the conclusion:

If the three preconditions are met, courts move to the final step of the Gingles analysis to consider whether, when all of the circumstances are considered, the political process is not equally open to minority voters. Alito emphasized that this inquiry should “focus on evidence that has more than a remote bearing on what the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits: present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting.” Quoting the Supreme Court’s 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act used to determine which state and local governments were required to obtain approval from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws and practices, Alito wrote that “‘things have changed dramatically’” in the South “in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.” When the law was enacted, he noted, “the Nation had faced nearly a century of ‘entrenched racial discrimination in voting,’” but “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.”

In this case, Alito said, Louisiana’s goal in adopting the 2024 map “was racial”: the state enacted it in the wake of the lower court’s finding that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and sought to avoid having the court impose a different map that would have created a second majority-Black district but which would also “have imperiled one of the influential incumbents the legislature sought to protect.”

The state did not have the kind of compelling interest that would have justified considering race in drawing the 2024 map, Alito wrote, because “the State did not need to create a new majority-minority district to comply with the Act. That is because,” he explained, “at every step of the Gingles framework,” the Black voters challenging the 2022 map “failed to prove their §2 case.”

Among other things, Alito said, the Black voters “did not provide an illustrative map that” protected the state’s Republican incumbents. Alito acknowledged that the Black voters had “offered evidence that black and white voters consistently supported different candidates, but their analysis did not control for partisan preference.” “And 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.”

“In sum,” Alito concluded, “because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8. That map is an unconstitutional gerrymander, and its use would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”

That last paragraph is the most important one, but somewhere along the way my eyes glassed over. The bottom line seems to be that, in order to have gerrymandered majority black districts, states need to present more strongly compelling reasons than before for why it’s necessary.

More here:

[Justice] Thomas suggested that the Supreme Court “should never have interpreted §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’” Wednesday’s decision, Thomas wrote, “should largely put an end to this ‘disastrous misadventure’ in voting-rights jurisprudence.” Thomas would have held, he added, that Section 2 “does not regulate districting at all.”

This decision will be followed by a host of redistricting effects, in particular that of Florida, which just passed a new law:

State lawmakers on Wednesday passed redrawn congressional lines that create an additional four GOP-leaning seats in Florida, making it the eighth state to complete mid-decade redistricting in the 2026 election cycle — and likely setting up a historic legal challenge in the state. …

DeSantis and Republicans have essentially acknowledged his map is out of line with the current state constitution, but they believe the state and U.S. Supreme Court rulings will eventually make the proposal constitutional. …

DeSantis’ argument rests on the idea that the Fair Districts provisions protecting minority-performing districts are unconstitutional …

“Properly understood, the Fourteenth Amendment forbids the government from divvying up the citizenry based in whole or in part upon race,” read a memo penned by DeSantis general counsel David Axelman.

During a Tuesday committee hearing, DeSantis administration map drawer Jason Parada acknowledged he used political performance data when creating his proposal, something Democrats argue is at odds with Fair Districts. But Parada said he did not consider at all racial data, which is in line with the governor’s direction.

It’s not just Florida, either. More states will be attempting something of the sort. It may not be possible for it to happen before the midterms, however.