The Supreme Courtroom Wednesday heard a Republican problem to the landmark Voting Rights Act that would kill many Black-held congressional seats and assist the GOP hold management of the Home of Representatives within the 2026 midterms and past.
The conservative-led prime court docket may comply with intestine provisions barring racial discrimination in redistricting, a transfer that will open the door for Republican-held legislatures to redraw congressional maps throughout the South and probably remove 10 or extra seats held by Black or Latino Democrats.
Such a choice would quantity to a political and racial earthquake that would tip the scales of management of Congress in favor of President Trump and Republicans.
It comes as Trump has already unleashed an unprecedented mid-decade battle over congressional redistricting aimed toward getting Texas and different Republican-controlled states to redraw their traces to make it simpler for the GOP to carry its slim majority within the Home in what’s shaping up as a Democratic-leaning 2026 political atmosphere.
Democrats in California and elsewhere are looking for to retaliate by nixing some GOP seats, however they maintain fewer state homes that draw the traces and have given map-making energy to unbiased commissions in some blue states like New York.
Republicans this week moved to seize one other Democratic-held seat in North Carolina and will search to remove two seats in deep crimson Indiana.
The case earlier than the Supreme Courtroom issues the congressional map in Louisiana, which has two majority Black districts and has 4 different seats held by white Republicans.
The highest court docket, by a 5-4 vote, affirmed a ruling that discovered a possible violation of the Voting Rights Act in the same case over Alabama’s congressional map in 2023. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three extra liberal colleagues.
That call led to new districts in Alabama and Louisiana that despatched two extra Black Democrats to Congress. However the court docket has signaled it may now reverse course, asking the events to handle whether or not ordering minority-majority districts is unconstitutional.
Twelve years in the past, the court docket took a sledgehammer to a different pillar of the landmark voting regulation that required states with a historical past of racial discrimination to get approval prematurely from the Justice Division or federal judges earlier than making election-related modifications.
The Supreme Courtroom has individually given state legislatures broad berth to gerrymander for political functions, topic solely to evaluation by state supreme courts.
If the court docket now weakens or strikes down the Voting Rights Act, states wouldn’t be sure by any limits in how they draw electoral districts, probably setting off a brand new rush to excessive gerrymandering.
Initially Printed: October 15, 2025 at 9:58 AM EDT
