Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state's May 16 congressional primaries and announced plans to redraw the state's House map after the Supreme Court ruled that a majority-Black district amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The decision, a 6-3 ruling by the Court's conservative majority, landed like a brick on Louisiana's election calendar and may ripple across the South.
Landry told House Republican candidates on Wednesday that he would cancel the upcoming primaries so state lawmakers could produce a new congressional map. A formal announcement could come as early as Friday, Breitbart reported.
The governor framed his action as a constitutional obligation. Elections held under a map the nation's highest court just invalidated would, in his view, be illegitimate on their face.
Landry said in a statement:
"Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters."
He added a broader principle: "The best way to end race-based discrimination is to stop making decisions based on race." That line captures the core of the Supreme Court's reasoning, and the core of a fight that has been building for decades.
The legal chain of events reads like a case study in how race-conscious redistricting can devour itself. After the 2020 census, Louisiana's legislature drew a new congressional map. In 2022, a federal judge in the Middle District of Louisiana held that the map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it did not include an additional majority-Black district.
So the state complied. Louisiana redrew its map in 2024 and added a second majority-Black district. But that new map was immediately challenged, this time as a racial gerrymander. A three-judge court in the Western District of Louisiana agreed, ruling the redrawn map violated the Equal Protection Clause. The state appealed to the Supreme Court.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, laid out the contradiction plainly. The Voting Rights Act told Louisiana to create a majority-Black district. The Constitution told Louisiana it couldn't sort voters by race. The state was whipsawed between the two.
Alito wrote:
"Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution, not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court's ยง2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids."
That collision, Alito explained, reached a breaking point in Louisiana. The Court had dodged the underlying question for more than three decades, whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act could justify race-based redistricting at all. This time, the justices stopped dodging.
The composition of the current Court made this moment possible. The conservative majority concluded that drawing district lines around race, even to satisfy a federal statute, departs from the constitutional rule that applies in virtually every other context.
"But allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. These and other problems convinced us that the time had come to resolve whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting."
The ruling's practical effect was immediate. Landry and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill issued a joint statement explaining that the Supreme Court had previously stayed an injunction against the state's enforcement of the current congressional map. With Wednesday's decision, that stay automatically terminated.
Fox News reported that Landry and Murrill stated: "By the Court's order, however, that stay automatically terminated with [Wednesday's] decision. Accordingly, the State is currently enjoined from carrying out congressional elections under the current map."
The suspension applies only to U.S. House races and related runoffs. Louisiana's Senate and state Supreme Court elections will still proceed on May 16, Just The News reported. House primaries have been pushed to at least July 15.
State officials said they are working with the legislature and the Secretary of State's office to chart a path forward. The Washington Examiner reported that lawmakers and election officials are now scrambling to redraw districts before congressional elections can move forward.
The ruling carries obvious partisan consequences. The district at the center of the case, Louisiana's 6th Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields, was specifically designed as a majority-Black seat. With that map now struck down, Fields's district may not survive in its current form.
A revised map could produce at least one additional Republican House seat before the November midterm elections. In a chamber where margins are razor-thin, one seat matters. And the ruling's logic extends well beyond Louisiana.
The New York Post noted that the decision weakens a provision of the Voting Rights Act that has been used for decades to compel the creation of majority-minority districts across the South. Other Republican-led states may now revisit their own maps, and the legal ground to challenge those maps on racial-gerrymander grounds just got firmer.
For years, the left treated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as a one-way ratchet: courts could order states to add majority-minority districts, and any state that refused was presumed to be acting out of racial animus. What the Supreme Court said Wednesday is that the ratchet cuts both ways. A state that draws lines primarily around race, even to comply with a federal statute, still has to answer to the Equal Protection Clause.
That is not a radical proposition. It is, in fact, the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment applied consistently. The Court's conservative majority has shown increasing willingness to resolve long-deferred constitutional questions rather than let lower courts improvise around them.
Alito's opinion made clear how long the Court had avoided the fundamental question. For more than thirty years, the justices assumed, without deciding, that Voting Rights Act compliance could justify race-based districting. They went further, assuming it was enough for a state to have a "strong basis in evidence" for thinking the Act required racial sorting.
That assumption was never tested against the Constitution's own prohibition on racial classifications in government action. Wednesday, it finally was. And it failed.
The implications stretch beyond redistricting. If the government cannot use race as a primary factor in drawing legislative maps, even when a federal statute appears to demand it, the same logic applies to other areas where race-conscious mandates have been treated as self-justifying. The ruling joins a line of recent decisions, including the Court's landmark rulings reshaping federal authority, that are forcing institutions to confront constitutional limits they had long ignored.
The immediate question is what the new map will look like. Louisiana's legislature, controlled by Republicans, will draw it. The governor has signaled that the process should move fast, fast enough to hold House primaries by mid-July.
Open questions remain. Will the new map face its own legal challenge? How many seats shift? And will other states, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, use this ruling to revisit maps drawn under the same Section 2 pressure?
The broader battle over the Court's direction will continue. But on redistricting, the majority has drawn a clear line: the Constitution does not permit racial sorting, even when a federal statute seems to demand it.
For thirty years, states were told to sort voters by skin color and call it justice. The Supreme Court finally said what should have been obvious all along: equal protection means equal protection.
