Michael Guest

On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court divided 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down Louisiana’s congressional redistricting map — drawn in direct compliance with a federal court’s order enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The majority did not apply established doctrine; it rewrote it, narrowing the VRA to near-irrelevance, overturning decades of precedent without candor, and reaching a result no honest application of existing law required. Callais is not a legal opinion. It is a political manifesto disguised in judicial reasoning.

Black voters challenged Louisiana’s 2022 map — containing only one majority-Black district among six — as a Section 2 violation, and courts agreed. Under Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), the controlling precedent for four decades, plaintiffs proved a second majority-Black district was feasible and that racial bloc voting routinely defeated Black-preferred candidates. Louisiana drew a remedial map as ordered. A separate group of plaintiffs challenged that map as a racial gerrymander, and the Supreme Court agreed. A state that complied with federal law was held to have violated the Constitution. The majority’s answer is not to resolve that paradox but to redefine what Section 2 requires.

This is raw revisionism. Gingles was a unanimous ruling: Congress’ 1982 VRA amendment explicitly rejected an intent requirement and substituted a “totality of the circumstances” results test to overturn Mobile v. Bolden (1980). Now, without overruling Gingles by name, the majority effectively replaces its results standard with the intent standard of Washington v. Davis (1976). To nullify four decades of statutory precedent through euphemism rather than candor is judicial sleight of hand.

The Roberts court’s own precedent condemns this result. In Allen v. Milligan (2023), Chief Justice John Roberts reaffirmed that the Gingles framework “remains the law.” In 2026, the court did precisely what Roberts then refused to do — without acknowledging it. When precedent inconveniences a preferred outcome, it is abandoned rather than honestly overruled: what Justice Elena Kagan has called “camouflage.”

The equal-protection analysis fares no better. The Shaw v. Reno (1993) line of cases was never meant to prohibit VRA compliance. In Easley v. Cromartie (2001), the court held that where race correlates with partisan affiliation, plaintiffs must prove race — not politics — predominated. Louisiana itself argued the map was drawn to protect Republican incumbents, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. Under Easley, that should have ended the challenge. The court’s refusal is irreconcilable with its own precedent.

Taken together with Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which eliminated Section 5’s preclearance mechanism, Callais completes the dismantlement of the VRA’s enforcement architecture. Section 5 is gone. Section 2 now requires proof of intentional discrimination — the same showing demanded by the 14th Amendment. A statute that adds nothing to the constitutional floor it was enacted to raise above is a statute without content — achieved here without a single opinion that forces the majority to defend the destruction in full.

The rule of law demands intellectual honesty, not merely the apparatus of judicial opinion-writing. Callais purports to honor Gingles while eviscerating it, reaffirms Section 2 while rendering it unenforceable, and condemns racial classification while applying that condemnation only to remedial measures — measures that exist because of the state’s own history of racial exclusion.

The Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965 at the cost of blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Louisiana v. Callais has withdrawn its promise. This decision will be remembered not as an act of judicial craftsmanship, but as an act of judicial will.

Michael D. Kmetz of Virginia Beach is a retired attorney and a retired Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer.