The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Louisiana v. Callais may dramatically alter congressional districts in Southern states. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito unraveled decades of confusing and misguided caselaw construing the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) to hold that states may not engage in racial gerrymandering—or be forced to do so by federal courts—when drawing congressional districts. The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause forbids race-based discrimination, Alito pointedly declared, preventing Section 2 of the VRA from being interpreted to require the creation of “majority-black” districts to comply with the VRA.

Congress enacted the VRA in 1965 (pursuant to Section 2 of the 15th Amendment) to prohibit states from disenfranchising blacks through obstacles such as poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, white primaries, and grandfather clauses—not to create electoral parity, a long-standing position of Justice Clarence Thomas’s that he repeated in his concurring opinion in Callais. As Justice Alito wrote for the majority, the “Voting Rights Act does not guarantee equal outcomes.”

Contrary to the claims of partisan critics, the decision in Louisiana v. Callais does not “gut” or “hollow out” the VRA. Nor, contrary to Justice Elena Kagan’s hysterical dissent, does the majority in Callais “eviscerate” the VRA or render Section 2 “all but a dead letter.” Justice Alito’s meticulous majority opinion merely prevents the VRA from being abused to dictate “proportional representation”—that is, racial quotas—contrary to the express language of Section 2, which states that “nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.”

One of the effects of the Court’s ruling will be producing Republican gains in the midterms. Improperly drawn maps, such as the Bayou State’s, will necessarily be revised to comply with Justice Alito’s narrowing of the leading VRA precedent, Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), authored 40 years ago by the notorious liberal activist Justice William Brennan. In a familiar scenario, Louisiana had created a second majority-black congressional district at the direction of a federal court, which interpreted the VRA to require greater representation for black voters. (In 2020, blacks comprised 31% of the state’s population.)

Reviewing and distinguishing the dense thicket of prior VRA precedents, the majority in Callais concluded that the Louisiana congressional map violates Section 2 of the VRA. Reaching this conclusion required a lengthy discussion of, and update to, the Supreme Court’s 1986 Gingles decision that caused much of the mischief and confusion under the VRA.

Alito’s mastery of the Court’s labyrinthine precedents under the VRA allowed him to bring along colleagues not inclined to overrule Gingles altogether, such as Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who upheld the decision just three years ago in Allen v. Milligan (2023). Alito’s consensus-building prowess has made him a remarkably effective originalist/textualist reformer on the Supreme Court, as Mollie Hemingway explains in her recently published biography of the justice, aptly titled Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.

Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Callais genteelly narrowed the holding of Gingles, which he contended “was decided at a time when this Court often paid insufficient attention to the language of statutory provisions,” a problem evident in Justice Brennan’s opinion. Callais holds that mere disparate impact is not the type of harm that violates the VRA or the 15th Amendment. In revisiting Gingles, the Court considered the “important developments” that have occurred in the past 40 years: Jim Crow is long over; the racial gap in voter registration and turnout has largely disappeared; a robust two-party system has emerged in most states; and in recent years, the Court has strictly limited the permissible use of racial distinctions. Accordingly, race-based redistricting is forbidden.

Louisiana v. Callais is consistent with the Roberts Court’s broader effort to restore the 14th Amendment’s command of color-blindness to the High Court, an approach that rejects the execrable body of “living Constitution” jurisprudence that I previously described in The American Mind as “an incoherent mélange of liberal pablum, a doctrinal wasteland.” One of the major failings of the non-originalist approach to constitutional law that prevailed under the tutelage of John Roberts’s predecessors, Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger, was the absurd notion that federal civil rights laws, enacted to remedy intentional race discrimination, should be construed to create equality of results rather than equality of opportunity. In this understanding, quotas require discrimination.

Hence, in the decades prior to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in SFFA v. Harvard, racial preferences in higher education (that is, racial and ethnic quotas) were permitted to achieve “diversity” despite statutory bans on race discrimination. Similarly, in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Court embraced the quota-conscious theory of “disparate impact” in employment discrimination, even though the relevant statute (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) prohibits only “intentional” discrimination, stating that preferential treatment is not required to achieve statistical parity in the workforce. Callais merely aligns the VRA with the race-neutrality dictated by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Despite the relatively straightforward statutory language, the Supreme Court’s opinions interpreting the VRA had created a bewildering doctrinal morass, strongly suggesting that race-predominant districting was permitted—or even required—to provide adequate “opportunities” for protected minorities to elect representatives of their choice. Congressional districts are drawn by state legislatures through gerrymandering, a practice dating to the early 19th century, often for the partisan benefit of the political party that controls the legislature. Disputes over gerrymandering are considered non-justiciable—meaning that courts will decline to review them since they involve political matters.

As a result of the Court’s muddled caselaw, liberal groups frequently filed lawsuits under Section 2 of the VRA—or threatened to do so, cowing legislators—to force states to adopt more majority-minority districts. Compounding the problem, amorphous judicial precedents made it difficult to distinguish between partisan gerrymandering (which is permitted) and maps that violate Section 2 of the VRA, particularly since blacks form a reliably Democratic voting bloc. Many lower federal courts had construed the Court’s VRA precedents to require proportional representation for blacks and other minorities despite the explicit language to the contrary in Section 2. This is what happened in Louisiana, producing marathon litigation that ended in last week’s decision.

Louisiana redrew its six congressional districts after the 2020 census to account for population shifts, initially retaining the single majority-black district in the existing map, which included much of New Orleans. VRA litigation predictably ensued, and in 2022, a federal court ordered the state to create a second majority-black district stretching some 250 miles from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. White residents objected to the unwieldy map that was created to comply with the court’s ruling. The objectors convinced a different federal court in Louisiana that the SB8 congressional map was racially gerrymandered and violated the Equal Protection Clause. In Callais, the Supreme Court agreed with that assessment.

Callais is a game-changer. States are no longer required to create election districts to achieve proportional representation—quotas, in effect. The VRA still protects voting rights, but curbs litigation abuses. In the words of Ed Blum, the champion of color-blindness who founded Students for Fair Admission, bogus VRA litigation pressured states “to sort citizens by race and draw majority-minority districts to hit demographic targets.” The Court’s prior VRA caselaw was not faithful to the text of the statute or to the Equal Protection Clause. Callais corrected that, restoring the original purpose of Section 2 and moving the nation toward a race-neutral system of election law.

Though leftist pundits are denouncing the Court’s ruling because much of the Democrats’ political power rests on racially gerrymandered maps that will be redrawn, the decision is a triumph of originalist/textualist analysis and equality before the law.