The Supreme Court on Monday evening agreed to immediately transmit to the lower courts its opinion striking down Louisiana’s congressional map, rather than wait 32 days, as would have been routine.
Last week’s landmark opinion from the court, which weakened the Voting Rights Act by concluding that one of Louisiana’s majority-Black congressional districts was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, has set off a chaotic scramble in the state.
Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, delayed a primary for House races, even with early voting scheduled to begin on Saturday, so that the state Legislature could work to immediately redraw maps. Republicans, who control the Legislature, are expected to try to eliminate at least one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. (Early voting in the state’s other races, including votes on constitutional amendments and a hotly contested Republican Senate primary, went forward.)
It was not immediately clear what effect Monday’s decision to send the case back to the lower courts without delay would have on the effort to speedily redistrict. Those moves have been challenged in court.
But a group of white voters who had challenged the Louisiana map and won their case before the Supreme Court had requested the move, believing that the technical step would make it easier to proceed quickly, and the court’s action does clear one barrier to drawing a new map.
In a one-paragraph, unsigned order, the court explained that “ordinarily,” the clerk of the Supreme Court waits the 32 days to send the opinion, in order to give the losing party time to ask the justices to reconsider the case. It is exceptionally rare for the court to agree to rehear a case once it has been argued and decided.
In the Louisiana case, the justices wrote, state officials who had defended the map and were on the losing side of the case had not opposed the request to expedite.
Although a group of Black voters who had intervened in the case had expressed their opposition, the justices wrote, those voters had “not expressed any intent” to use the 32-day window to ask the court to reconsider its decision.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s three liberals and the first Black woman to serve on the court, asserted that the court’s decision to overturn Louisiana’s voting map had “spawned chaos” in the state.
She called the court’s decision to expedite the transmittal of the opinion “tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.” She said the court was diving into the political fray with an abandon that was “unwarranted and unwise.”
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Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., one of the court’s conservatives, responded in an unusually sharply worded concurrence. Justice Jackson’s position, he wrote, “would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional.” He was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, both conservatives.
Justice Alito called Justice Jackson’s assertions that the court was improperly using its power “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.”
The ruling was the latest move in a scramble to draw up new midterms maps across the South following the court’s landmark ruling on April 29, which gutted the remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act.
The court’s decision in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, found that the state’s map, which had created a second majority-Black district, violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
That decision could make it harder for lawmakers to create majority-minority districts throughout the country and has set off a scramble in states across the South to redistrict before the midterm elections. Absentee ballots had already been requested in some states.
Louisiana’s Legislature was already in session when the ruling came down. Two Republican-led states in the South — Alabama and Tennessee — are convening special legislative sessions this week, aiming to take action before their primaries. Alabama, which gaveled into session on Monday, is moving to delay some of its primaries in hopes that the Supreme Court will pave the way for them to take up a new map.
In Tennessee, where a legislative session is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, the Republican supermajority is widely expected to approve a map that would eliminate its lone majority-Black district. The seat is currently held by a Democrat, Representative Steve Cohen. Legislative leaders have not yet shared their proposals publicly.
