WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court appeared likely to further erode the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday as the justices debated how to remedy racial discrimination in elections.

“You’re saying sometimes it’s acceptable for a federal district court to order a map that intentionally discriminates on the basis of race?” Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Donald Trump appointee, asked voting advocates.

Louisiana added a second majority-Black district after multiple courts concluded that its congressional maps likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory vote dilution. The conservative justices were concerned about how race played into Louisiana’s new maps, questioning whether they violated the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another Trump appointee, said that courts can use race to create remedial maps “so long as it’s not excessive,” but he questioned whether that practice should cease.

“This court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of 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 said. “What exactly do you think the end point should be for the intentional use of race to create districts?”

Louisiana’s first set of new maps only included one majority-Black district despite Black voters making up 30% of the adult population in the state. Civil rights groups sued Louisiana for diluting the votes of Black voters, and after a protracted legal battle and federal court ruling, the state Legislature drew new maps in 2024 with a second majority-Black district.

Litigation continued, however, after a group of “non-African American voters” sued the state — so far unsuccessfully — claiming the new maps are unconstitutional because they considered race.

In March, the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether the Legislature relied too heavily on race when redrawing Louisiana’s maps. Instead of issuing a decision in June, the justices delayed a decision and scheduled an additional argument this term.

The conservative justices looked likely to throw out Louisiana’s 2024 maps. Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, was one of several justices to note that Louisiana’s remedial map was drawn based on a preliminary decision in the lower courts.

“Under protest, we drew [the 2024 map] because the threat was that the federal courts were going to do it if we didn’t,” J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general, said.

To avoid violating the equal protection clause, legislatures have a compelling interest to use race when drawing maps. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, questioned whether the state’s reasoning qualified.

“The state would have to say at that point: ‘Well, we’re weighing race heavily because we have a compelling interest in avoiding a Section 2 violation,’” Barrett said. “The state’s position might be we don’t actually really think that we violated Section 2, but we have a litigation risk.”

Barrett suggested that the court clarify its prior rulings that created the standard for when race could be used to remedy a Voting Rights Act violation.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that the court’s prior rulings already provided exacting and robust requirements for litigating Section 2 claims. Nelson noted that the court recently reaffirmed those precedents in a 2022 case regarding redistricting in Alabama.

“This court [has] said that it must be particularly concerned about changing its decisions or rejecting stare decisis in cases that involve a sensitive political context like this one,” Nelson, who argued for the voting advocates, said. “That calls the court’s legitimacy into question in a new unique way.”

Because many states have used Section 2 to draw their districts, the voting advocates warned that removing its protections would lead to a resurgence of discrimination. One report estimated that if the Supreme Court sides with Louisiana, Republicans could secure an additional 19 safe seats in the House of Representatives and cement GOP control for at least a generation.

While all the conservatives seemed to take issue with Louisiana’s 2024 maps, there wasn’t a consensus on how to fix them. The liberal justices were concerned that their colleagues’ solution would gut what’s left of the landmark law.

“The bottom line is just get rid of Section 2,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, said, describing one potential solution.

Sotomayor said the conservative justices were only looking at the use of race in a negative context.

“Race is always a part of these decisions, and my colleagues are trying to tease it out in this intellectual way that doesn’t deal with the fact that race is used to help people,” Sotomayor said.

Justice Elena Kagan, another Obama appointee, said that race was only used in response to discrimination.

“The race-based redistricting that you’re now objecting to is redistricting designed to remedy a specific, identified, proved violation of law; more, a specific, identified, proved racial discrimination by the state,” Kagan told Louisiana’s solicitor general.

The Trump administration has suggested that the justices consider whether a state’s maps depart from race-neutral principles. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, worried that solution prevented remedies for discrimination in places with a history of segregation, like Louisiana.

“I hear your test not allowing us to solve that problem when the state is continuing to present the same map under circumstances in which people are not actually able to have equal electoral opportunity,” Jackson said.

David Gans, director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center, predicted that the court would ultimately gut the Voting Rights Act.

“This idea that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments — added to the Constitution to ensure that Black Americans would be full members of the body politic — bars legal remedies for racial vote dilution designed to cancel out Black voting strength turns the Constitution on its head,” Gans said in a statement.

He continued, “In this morning’s oral argument, the court’s conservative justices turned a blind eye to this core part of the Fifteenth Amendment’s text and history.”