After three separate federal courts held that Louisiana’s prior congressional map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits states from diluting the voting strength of voters of color, the Louisiana state legislature enacted its current congressional map—SB8—to redress that violation, while also accomplishing other political objectives. The United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, however, held the Legislature’s actions unconstitutional and enjoined the new redistricting plan, concluding that its decision to create a second majority Black district—as required by Section 2—while furthering other permissible redistricting goals resulted in a racial gerrymander. Press Robinson and other voters of color (who had successfully challenged Louisiana’s original map under Section 2) and the State of Louisiana appealed the decision, asking the Supreme Court to reverse the district court’s ruling. 

In December 2024, CAC filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold Louisiana’s remedial map. Our brief explained that the district court’s decision was contrary to Supreme Court precedent and undermined effective enforcement of Section 2 and the Fifteenth Amendment.   

As we detailed in our brief, the district court’s conclusion that SB8 is a racial gerrymander was irreconcilable with Supreme Court precedent. The court made three fundamental errors in its racial gerrymandering analysis and thereby usurped the Legislature’s prerogative to use its broad discretion to enact its preferred remedial map.  

First, the court below incorrectly treated the Legislature’s stated intention to create a second majority Black district as virtually decisive evidence of racial predominance. If the district court were right, then any remedial map drawn by a state legislature in response to judicial findings of a Section 2 violation would trigger strict scrutiny. That is plainly incorrect and would upend the Supreme Court’s well-settled Voting Rights Act jurisprudence, which requires states to take account of race to ensure fair maps which give citizens of all races equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Second, the district court discredited the valid political considerations that motivated the Legislature’s enactment of SB8 and frustrated the Legislature’s ability to advance its own non-remedial interests when drawing Section 2-compliant districts. Finally, the district court erroneously required SB8 to meet the Gingles requirements, which concern requirements for Section 2 liability, but are irrelevant to the lawfulness of a remedial map. 

The district court’s decision would also thwart Section 2’s ability to enforce the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment. By prohibiting maps that dilute the voting strength of communities of color, Section 2 enforces the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting and thereby strengthens our nation’s multiracial democracy. Here, the district court’s rejection of a legislatively-enacted map designed to remedy vote dilution undercuts the effective enforcement of Section 2 and, in turn, the Fifteenth Amendment. If left uncorrected, the district court’s ruling would make it unnecessarily difficult for jurisdictions to comply with Section 2 and substantially threaten Section 2’s ability to protect voters of color against vote dilution. 

In June 2025, the Supreme Court ordered supplemental briefing on the question of whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments, and in September 2025, CAC filed an amicus brief explaining that it did not.  

As we detail in our brief, it is constitutionally permissible for state mapmakers and other actors to take race into account in drawing maps that comply with the Voting Rights Act, particularly where, as here, the state acts to rectify discriminatory maps that a court has previously found unlawful. Our brief made three principal points. 

First, as its text and history show, the Fifteenth Amendment gives Congress a broad enforcement power to prevent impairment of the right to vote. Against the backdrop of a political system divided by race, the Framers explicitly granted Congress broad legislative powers through the enforcement clause, providing that “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” By adding this language to the Amendment, the Framers gave Congress sweeping authority to stamp out every conceivable attempt by states to deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race. 

Second, Congress used its enforcement power under the Fifteenth Amendment to prohibit dilutive practices that nullify the effectiveness of Black votes. Throughout the Reconstruction South, state governments packed and cracked Black voters into gerrymandered districts in order to undercut the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal political opportunity. With these dilutive practices in mind, Congress wrote the results test to make unlawful any voting practice that results in the denial of equal political opportunities to voters of color. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that this language covers instances in which state mapmakers exploit racially polarized voting by packing and cracking communities of color to dilute the effectiveness of their votes. When Congress amended Section 2 in 1982, it understood that race and racially polarized voting had to be taken into account by mapmakers to prevent vote dilution. And for nearly four decades, courts have applied the longstanding Gingles test, which requires the consideration of race, to identify and remedy vote dilution, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Allen v. Milligan. 

Third, race-consciousness is embedded in the text and history of the Fifteenth Amendment. Appellees argue that the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits states from taking race into account in formulating remedies for violations of the VRA. However, nothing in the text and history of the Fifteenth Amendment supports Appellees’ crabbed view of the Constitution’s protections against racial discrimination in voting. Indeed, the Reconstruction Framers wrote the Fifteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause in sweeping terms precisely because of the reality that the electoral system was divided along racial lines. In enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress can require states to take race into account in order to properly ensure that voters of color can participate equally in the political process and elect representatives of their choice. 

In April 2026, the Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s decision, holding that Louisiana’s redistricting plan to create a second majority Black district was unconstitutional and that “no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8.” This decision, together with prior Roberts Court rulings in Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. DNC, all but entirely hollowed out the Voting Rights Act and constituted the latest step in what Justice Elena Kagan’s dissenting opinion rightly called “the judicial project to destroy the Voting Rights Act.”