Welcome back to SCOTUS Oral Arguments and Opinions.

Today we're tackling one of the most consequential voting rights cases in decades, Louisiana versus Calais.

This case could fundamentally reshape how we think about race conscious redistricting and the constitutional limits of the Voting Rights Act.

The Court slated oral arguments in this case for October 15th.

October 15th is the last day of oral arguments for October 2025.

Before we get started, let's discuss one piece of housekeeping.

As previously mentioned, the Supreme Court kicks off oral arguments this Monday, October 6th, with Burke versus Choi and Villarreal versus Texas.

On Tuesday, October 7th, the court hears arguments in Chiles versus Salazar and Barrett versus United States.

And on Wednesday, October 8th, the court hears Postal Services v. Conan and Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections.

Check out our episode previews on those cases to get up to speed.

We'll host the oral arguments after they air, so follow us, rate and share so that we can enjoy this term together.

Okay, with that piece of housekeeping out of the way, let's tackle Louisiana vs. Calais.

In this case, what started as a routine challenge to Louisiana's congressional map morphed into an existential question of about Section 2 of the Voting Rights act itself.

The Supreme Court is asking whether creating majority minority districts violates the 14th and 15th amendments, the very amendments the VRA was designed to enforce.

Think of it this Congress says it's protecting civil rights, but critics argue it's actually creating the very discrimination it's supposed to prevent.

It's a constitutional paradox with massive implications.

And this case sits right at the intersection of the Court's recent decision in Students for Fair Admissions, the affirmative action case, and decades of voting rights precedent.

If the Court rules broadly, minority representation in Congress could drop significantly.

So buckle up.

We're about to explore how a Louisiana redistricting dispute became a potential constitutional earthquake that could reshape American democracy itself.

Let me read the supplemental question the court ordered briefing on whether the state's intentional creation of a second majority minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. constitution.

Now for our listeners, a majority minority district is a congressional district where racial minorities, in this case black voters, make up more than 50% of the population.

These districts are often created by drawing specific geographic boundaries to group together minority communities that might otherwise be spread across different districts.

And that word intentional is crucial.

The Court isn't asking about accidental demographics where minorities just happen to be concentrated.

They're asking about deliberate government action to create racial majorities by redrawing district lines.

Exactly.

And when the government intentionally sorts people by race, even for supposedly good reasons, that triggers what lawyers call strict scrutiny.

For listeners who want a deeper dive into how courts apply different levels of constitutional review, check out our August 19 episode called Road Work Ahead how, for 2024 cases may be reshaping First Amendment scrutiny.

We explain it using a road system analogy that makes these concepts really clear.

In short, strict scrutiny is like a constitutional roadblock.

The government faces an almost impossible task of proving they have a compelling reason, and they're using the absolute least restrictive means possible.

Most laws don't survive this level of review.

Now let's look at the key constitutional text.

The 14th Amendment, Section 5 states the the Congress shall have power to enforce by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

The 15th Amendment, Section 2 is nearly identical.

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Those enforcement clauses are crucial because Congress used them to justify the Voting Rights Act.

But here's the constitutional paradox.

While Congress says it's enforcing these amendments to protect voting rights, the challengers argue that the VRA actually violates the equal protection principles embedded in those same amendments.

It's the legal equivalent of using a medicine that might cure the disease but also poison the patient.

Can the same constitutional text that authorizes civil rights protection also prohibit the methods Congress chose to provide that protection?

As discussed in other episodes, this case presents a convoluted procedural history.

Let me walk you through it step by step, because it shows how voting rights litigation actually works in practice.

It starts with a different case, Robinson vs. Ardouan.

Back in 2022, voting rights group sued Louisiana, claiming the state's congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights act by diluting black voting strength.

Now, Section two is the key provision here.

Unlike other civil rights laws that require proof of intention discrimination, Section two uses what's called an effects test.

You don't need to prove that lawmakers were racist.

You just need to show that the electoral system creates a discriminatory result that denies minority voters equal opportunity.

The legal test comes from a 1986 case called Thornburg vs Gingles.

It requires three things.

First, the minority group must be large and geographically concentrated enough to form a majority in a district.

Second, the minority group must be politically cohesive, meaning they tend to support the same candidates.

Third, the white majority must vote as a bloc to usually defeat minority preferred candidates.

In June 2022, a federal district court in Louisiana looked at the evidence and said this likely violates Section 2.

The court found racially polarized Voting, meaning black and white voters consistently supported different candidates and concluded that Louisiana's map denied black voters a fair opportunity to elect their preferred representatives.

Here's where the legal drama begins.

The court ordered Louisiana to redraw its congressional map with a second majority black district within just five legislative days.

Think about that.

Completely redrawing congressional boundaries in less than a week.

Then came what I can only describe as procedural ping pong.

The fifth Circuit Court of Appeals initially stayed that order, then vacated the day the Supreme Court stepped in and state everything pending their decision in Allen vs. Milligan.

That's the Alabama redistricting case that was decided in 2023.

After Milligan, where the court upheld Alabama's Section 2 obligation to create a second majority Black district, the Supreme Court essentially said never mind about their stay in Louisiana, vacated it and sent everything back to the 5th Circuit.

Meanwhile, Louisiana is caught in this legal whirlwind, not knowing which map to use for actual elections.

The Fifth Circuit eventually vacated the preliminary injunction in November 2023, but by then Louisiana had already decided to act.

They created what's called SB8.6, a new congressional map that intentionally creates a second majority black district.

But here's the constitutional crisis.

While Louisiana says we're just complying with federal law, the challengers argue that this compliance itself violates the Constitution.

The Supreme Court initially granted certiorari in this case back in 2014 on different issues.

But the supplemental question we're discussing didn't emerge until this term.

After oral arguments in March 2025, the court took the unusual step of ordering reargument and requesting supplemental briefing.

That's Supreme Court speak for this case just got a lot more complicated.

When the court orders supplemental briefing, it usually means they've identified a fundamental constitutional issue that could reshape entire areas of law and requiring reargument.

That suggests the Justices are grappling with potentially explosive constitutional questions.

Let's break down the competing constitutional visions here, starting with Louisiana and the Robinson interveners who are defending race conscious redistricting.

Their first argument is that Congress acted within its core constitutional authority when it enacted section 2.

They emphasized that the 15th amendment is the only place in the Constitution that explicitly mentions race, and it does so specifically to empower Congress to combat racial discrimination in voting.

They quote the court's 1966 decision in South Carolina vs. Katzenbach, which described racially discriminatory voting practices as involving unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.

Their point is that Congress holds full remedial powers to address such Discrimination.

And that power doesn't disappear just because we're decades removed from the original Voting Rights Act.

What's particularly interesting is how they frame ongoing necessity.

They point to recent examples and like how Alabama tried to circumvent the Supreme Court's Milligan decision by drawing a new map that perpetuated the exact same section 2 violation the court had just struck down.

Their argument is essentially look, discrimination is still happening, just in more subtle forms.

Their second major argument focuses on strict scrutiny analysis.

Remember, that's the nearly impossible constitutional standard we discussed earlier this they contend that complying with Section 2 constitutes what lawyers call a compelling governmental interest.

They cite the Court's assumption in Shaw vs Hunt that compliance with Section 2 could be a compelling interest.

Their logic is straightforward.

If Congress validly enacted this law under its constitutional enforcement powers, then following that law must itself be constitutional.

You can't be damned if you do and and damned if you don't.

Their third argument addresses what's called narrow tailoring, the idea that even if the government proves a compelling reason for racial classification, it must use the least restrictive means possible.

They emphasize that Section 2 retains built in limitations through the Gingels test we discussed earlier.

They argue it's not a blank check for racial gerrymandering.

You can't just draw majority minority districts anywhere you want.

You need evidence of politically cohesive minority communities, racially polarized voting, and actual denial of electoral opportunity.

Now let's flip to the challengers, the Calais Apellees, who present a fundamentally different constitutional worldview.

Their first major argument is that Section two fails what's called congruence and proportionality review.

This is a doctrine from a 1997 case called City of Born vs Flores.

Basically, it says that when Congress exercises its enforcement powers or under the Reconstruction Amendments, the remedy must be proportional to the actual constitutional violations Congress is trying to prevent.

Think of it as constitutional proportionality.

The punishment must fit the crime.

The challengers argue that Congress never made contemporary findings about ongoing racial discrimination in districting that would justify Section 2's extraordinary remedy.

They point out that from 1982 to today, Congress hasn't updated its factual findings about current discrimination patterns.

They Note that by 1995, just over a decade after Section 2's effects test was created, the Court was already warning that the VRA's command that states engage in presumptively unconstitutional race based districting brings the act into tension with the 14th amendment.

Their point is that these constitutional tensions have only gotten worse over 40 more years.

Their second argument centers on Students for Fair admissions, the 2023 Harvard and UNC affirmative action case that essentially ended race conscious college admissions.

They argue that SFFA fundamentally changed the constitutional landscape for any race conscious government action.

That's a really aggressive reading of sffa.

They're essentially arguing that the anti classification principle from sffa, the idea that the Constitution is generally colorblind, should apply to voting rights, even though SFFA was about university admissions.

They contend that the government can't sort citizens by race without evidence of specific current intentional discrimination.

What's striking about their argument is the claim that the record in this case was devoid of evidence of specific current intentional discrimination.

They argue that Section 2's effects test, which doesn't require proof of racist intent, is no longer constitutionally sufficient after sffa.

Their third argument attacks what's called the good reasons test from the Shaw line of cases.

Under current law, states can use race in redistricting if they have good good reasons to believe Section 2 requires it, even without ironclad proof of a violation.

The challengers argue this provides insufficient constitutional protection because states don't even need to prove an actual Section 2 violation, just that they had reasonable grounds to think one existed.

They contrast this with Shaw's original requirement that states have a strong basis in evidence before engaging in race conscious districting.

Perhaps most dramatically, they argue that Section 2 became discrimination's main source and aggravator rather than a remedy for discrimination.

They claim the VRA outlived its constitutional justification and now perpetuates the very racial classifications it was designed to eliminate.

The Court already heard initial oral arguments in March 2025, but remember, they've ordered reargument focused specifically on this supplemental constitutional question.

That means we're likely to see a much more focused discussion on whether Section 2 itself can survive constitutional scrutiny.

I'm particularly interested in how the conservative justices approach this tension.

We know from previous cases that several are deeply skeptical of race conscious government action, but the Voting Rights act traditionally additionally enjoyed broader ideological support as necessary.

Civil Rights protection Watch for questions about what lawyers call the temporal scope of congressional power.

The core issue Can Congress enact civil rights legislation based on 1960s findings about discrimination and have it remain constitutional indefinitely?

Or does changing social context require updated constitutional justification?

The liberal justices will likely focus on the ongoing reality of voting discrimination, even if the forms have changed since 1965 less poll taxes and literacy tests, more sophisticated gerrymandering and voter suppression.

They'll probably argue that racial polarization in voting persists and requires continued federal oversight.

I'M also watching for how the Court handles the interaction between SFFA and voting rights.

SFFA involved educational diversity and individual student admissions.

But does its anti classification principle extend to political representation and electoral districts?

That interaction could determine whether Section 2 survives at all.

And there's a massive practical question lurking here.

What happens to existing majority minority districts if the Court sides with the challengers?

There are currently dozens of such congressional districts nationwide, many Created under Section 2 requirements.

Are we looking at a complete restructuring of American political representation from a federalism perspective?

That's the balance between federal and state power.

This case also tests how much federal oversight of state election processes the Constitution permits.

The conservative justices have shown increasing concern about what they see as federal micromanagement of traditional state functions like redistricting.

Louisiana vs Calais represents a potential constitutional inflection point that could reshape American democracy.

If the Court sides with the challengers and strikes down Section 2's effects test, it would eliminate the primary tool for combating voting discrimination and could trigger a wave of redistricting challenges nationwide.

The implications extend far beyond Louisiana's Congressional map.

A broad ruling could effectively gut the Voting Rights Act's most important remaining provision and eliminate most majority minority districts across the country.

We're talking about potentially reducing black and Latino representation in Congress significantly.

But even if the Court rules more narrowly, this case signals the ongoing tension between what scholars call anti discrimination principles and anti classification principles in constitutional law.

The Court seems increasingly skeptical of race conscious government action, even when designed to remedy proven discrimination.

What's remarkable is how this case illustrates the evolution of constitutional interpretation over 60 years.

The same Reconstruction amendments that were used to justify the Voting Rights act in 1965 are now being invoked to potentially strike it down in 2025.

That's the challenge of applying 19th century constitutional text to 21st century problems.

The Court's decision will force a fundamental reckoning with how much race consciousness our Constitution permits in the pursuit of racial equality in political representation.

It's a question that goes to the heart of what equal protection means in a diverse democracy.

We'll be watching closely as this landmark case develops.

The Court's ruling could determine whether the civil rights gains of the 1960s remain constitutionally protected or whether we're entering a new era of constitutional colorblindness that prioritizes formal equality over substantive representation.

Thanks for joining us for this deep dive into Louisiana versus Calais.

It's a perfect example of how constitutional law grapples with the complex relationship between equality, representation and and federalism in our democratic system.

As always, if you found this helpful, please rate and share the podcast.

And if you're a voting rights attorney, redistricting expert, or constitutional scholar, we'd love to hear your thoughts on how this case might reshape American electoral law.

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