Supreme Court Guts Section 2 of Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, Reworking 40-Year Gingles Standard

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Louisiana v. Callais (No. 24-109) that Louisiana’s majority-minority congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander even though it had been drawn to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The majority fundamentally reworked the 1986 Thornburg v. Gingles standard, holding that compliance with Section 2 cannot itself justify race-conscious mapping — collapsing the legal mechanism that for forty years required the creation of majority-minority districts in Deep South states. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, called the ruling an evisceration of a still-necessary civil rights protection.

This is the merits ruling underlying the May 4, 2026 immediate-effect order (2026-05-04–scotus-callais-vra-section-2-immediate-effect-order-overrides-100k-ballots) and the cascade of Southern remapping that followed (2026-06-12–vra-gutted-southern-states-race-to-redraw-maps-eliminating-majority-black-districts). It completes the arc begun when the Court expanded the Louisiana case to reach Section 2 itself (2025-08-01–scotus-expands-louisiana-case-to-challenge-section-2-vra) and reargued it in October 2025, and it reverses the protective posture of Allen v. Milligan (2023). Republican-controlled legislatures in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi are now expected to remap congressional districts to eliminate majority-minority seats ahead of the November 2026 midterms — the court-rigging category of the accountability-elimination framework operating at the level of the franchise itself.