Takeaways from the Supreme Court arguments on the Voting Rights Act and racebased redistricting John Fritze, Devan Cole, CNNOctober 15, 2025 at 10:33 PM 8 This sketch shows the inside of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, during oral arguments on October 15, 2025.
- - Takeaways from the Supreme Court arguments on the Voting Rights Act and race-based redistricting
John Fritze, Devan Cole, CNNOctober 15, 2025 at 10:33 PM
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This sketch shows the inside of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, during oral arguments on October 15, 2025. - Dana Verkouteren
The Supreme Court's conservative supermajority signaled deep skepticism Wednesday over the creation of a second majority Black district in Louisiana and appeared open to at least weakening the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a way that could limit minority representation in Congress.
On one level, the case is about a single congressional district in Louisiana – drawn after the 2020 census to ensure African American voters could elect a candidate of their choice. More fundamentally, the case is about whether governments may actively address discrimination – current or historic – by taking an action that is intended to help racial minorities.
It is also about whether the Supreme Court's conservative justices view the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil rights era, as good law.
The court's decision will almost certainly have sweeping implications beyond the Pelican State. It could potentially reduce minority representation not only in Congress but also in state legislatures and school boards across the country. Depending on the scope of the court's ruling and its timing, it could also upend the 2026 midterms.
Here's what to know from oral arguments:
Kavanaugh is the key
At issue is a protracted court case that started when Louisiana drew only one congressional district out of six with an opportunity to election a Black member of Congress, despite the fact that African Americans make up about a third of the state's population.
A group of Black plaintiffs sued over that district, and a lower court found the maps likely violated the Voting Rights Act. When the state responded by drawing a second majority Black district, a group of White plaintiffs argued state lawmakers had impermissibly considered race in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Almost immediately, Justice Brett Kavanaugh – a member of the court's conservative wing – affirmed predictions that he would be the most important person to watch in the case. And over the course of more than two hours, Kavanaugh remained a driving force in the discussion.
Just two years ago, Kavanaugh was the deciding vote to uphold the current approach to the Voting Rights Act in a similar case involving Alabama's congressional districts. At the time, however, he raised concerns about race-based remedies – that is, using race as a factor to address discrimination – that were in place indefinitely. He repeated those concerns on Wednesday.
"The issue, as you know, is that this court's cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period time – sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases – but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point," Kavanaugh told the attorney representing a group of Black voters who successfully challenged Louisiana's first map.
Chief Justice John Roberts, another important vote, also quickly tried to draw a distinction between the Louisiana case and the court's surprising decision two years ago to order Alabama to redraw its map.
Roberts, who previously called Louisiana's district a "snake," seemed to subtly question the idea that the Alabama decision should control the outcome in Louisiana.
That case, Roberts said, took the "existing precedent as a given" and considered "Alabama's particular challenge."
The exchange prompted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to jump in and say that also at issue in the Alabama case was whether to change the way courts look at the Voting Rights Act in redistricting.
"And," Jackson said, "we chose not to."
Something less than gutting?
The parties pushing back on Louisiana's second Black congressional district brought slightly different legal arguments into the Supreme Court's ornate chamber on Wednesday. Louisiana, which initially defended the new map and now rejects it, wants a broad ruling that the Constitution bars states from ever considering race when fixing a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Such a ruling would gut the landmark 1965 law.
But there appeared to be interest, including from Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in taking a more nuanced approach.
A proposal raised by the Trump administration would require plaintiffs alleging a Voting Rights Act violation to demonstrate that voters in a state cast a ballot differently based specifically on race – decoupled from their political affiliation. Under that approach, if Black voters in a district heavily favor Democrats and White voters heavily favor Republicans, a decision not to create a Black-majority district would be based on partisan rather than motivations.
Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, during oral arguments on October 15, 2025. - Dana Verkouteren
It is a point that Kavanaugh repeatedly pressed attorneys to address.
"I would have thought that solves a lot of the concerns that you've identified," Kavanaugh told Benjamin Anguiñaga, Louisiana's solicitor general.
Anguiñaga described that idea as a "half solution."
But while perhaps less aggressive than gutting the law entirely, DOJ's proposal would likely make it much harder to prove violations of the law, critics say.
"The bottom line," liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, is that approach would "just get rid of" the key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
"The standard that you're setting," she said, "is a much different one."
Liberals warn of wide impact
Throughout the hearing, the court's three liberals appeared distressed about by the prospect of their colleagues chipping away at the landmark civil rights law.
They focused much of their fire on Congress' intent in enacting the Voting Rights Act: to root out discrimination that targeted African American voters. They questioned the Trump administration's approach, suggesting it would require plaintiffs to meet a much higher standard than is required by the law currently to find discriminatory maps.
The liberals repeatedly tussled with attorneys representing Louisiana and the White voters challenging the state's decision to create a second majority-Black congressional district, with Sotomayor at one point pressing Anguiñaga on why the state's position had changed from what it was when the case was first heard by the justices earlier this year.
At the time, Aguiñaga said politics – not race – had played the predominant role in drawing the map. The districts were designed, he said, to protect House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.
"Are you walking that back?" Sotomayor asked pointedly. "We always talk about what predominates and what predominated here was politics – that's what you said the last time."
On the other hand, Louisiana had always represented that it redrew its map because of a court order finding that it likely violated the Voting Rights Act.
At another point, Justice Elena Kagan zeroed in on what the "results on the ground" would be if the Supreme Court struck down Section 2 of the law.
The consequences, the lawyer representing Black voters in Louisiana told Kagan, "would be pretty catastrophic."
Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, explained that the VRA had paved the way for the election of every Black representative the state has sent to Washington.
"We only have the diversity that we see across the South, for example, because of litigation that forced the creation of opportunity districts under the Voting Rights Act," she said.
Court's broader direction
The Voting Rights Act fight involves what has become a familiar – and increasingly fought – debate over race in recent years: whether the Constitution is colorblind, or whether policies may try to make up for past racism.
That complicated question is at the heart of much of Trump's rejection of diversity and inclusion programs, for instance, as well as efforts to reform police departments and the judicial system generally.
It's also squarely at issue in the question over minority representation in Congress.
And in recent years, the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court has come down hard on the side of colorblindness.
Louisiana in its arguments drew a line directly to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in 2023 gutting affirmative action admissions policies in the nation's colleges.
"There is no safe harbor for racial discrimination the government deems good discrimination," Louisiana told the Supreme Court in written arguments. "These violations of basic equal protection principles ended race-based admissions programs. They should also end race-based redistricting."
Voting rights groups counter that courts and Congress have explicitly carved out an exception for race-conscious remedies for "ongoing unlawful" discriminatory policies. And that, those groups said, is precisely what happened with Louisiana's first congressional map.
"The ongoing pattern of racial discrimination in voting in the state makes Louisiana the prototypical case for the ongoing need" for Voting Rights Act enforcement, the NAACP and other groups told the Supreme Court, "not for abandoning it."
CNN's Casey Gannon contributed to this report.
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