Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Districting

Last week, in the decision for Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court narrowed the reach of the Voting Rights Act so that it no longer requires state legislatures to consider race in drawing boundaries for congressional and state-legislative districts. The Court ruled, in a 6–3 decision, that legislatures cannot use race as a basis for drawing district lines unless they can point to patterns of intentional discrimination that can only be corrected by similarly tailored remedies, a departure from past rulings, which stipulated that legislatures must consider the racial effects of districting decisions.