A new Supreme Court case is giving Justice Clarence Thomas a fresh shot at tearing down a key part of the Voting Rights Act — something he’s been trying to do for over 30 years.
Back in 1994, Thomas was the only justice calling for major changes to the law meant to protect Black and Hispanic voters from discrimination. At the time, no one but Justice Antonin Scalia backed him. But today, the court looks a lot different. Thanks to Donald Trump’s appointees, Thomas has allies — and a new case from Louisiana could be the moment he’s been waiting for.
CNN called it a “mysterious order” from the high court. The justices quietly agreed to hear a redistricting case from Louisiana this October — and it could reshape how voting maps are drawn across the country.
The case centers on whether Louisiana’s new congressional map — which includes two Black-majority districts — goes too far in protecting minority voters. A lower court had ruled that the old map, with just one Black-majority district, likely violated the Voting Rights Act. But some on the Supreme Court now seem ready to question the law itself.
Justice Thomas has already made his position crystal clear.
“I am hopeful that this Court will soon realize that the conflict its Section 2 jurisprudence has sown with the Constitution is too severe to ignore,” he wrote in a six-page dissent after the court failed to reach a decision on June 27.
Thomas was the only one to sign the opinion, but he’s not alone. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett have all shown they’re open to his idea of a “race neutral” voting system — which critics say ignores the real history of discrimination. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh have also hinted they could be persuaded.
During oral arguments in March, Roberts questioned whether one of Louisiana’s new Black-majority districts even made sense.
He described it as “a snake that runs from one end of the state to the other.”
Gorsuch went even further. He argued that using race at all in redistricting — even to fix a racially biased map — could violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Kavanaugh also questioned whether states had the power to make such changes.
All of this comes as states like Alabama openly defy federal court orders to fix racially biased maps — and as the Justice Department, under Donald Trump, stepped back from enforcing voting rights protections.
This Louisiana case could let Thomas and his allies go further than ever before — possibly gutting the Voting Rights Act’s most important section. If that happens, it could get much harder to stop states from drawing maps that weaken the power of Black and Hispanic voters.
