Welcome to the final edition of the Spring semester of The Fill From the Hill, a recurring political column where one University Times writer dissects the key political topics and controversies in the news, from domestic politics to international affairs. This week tackles the Supreme Court striking down part of the Voting Rights Act. Despite my position, this column is not representative or a reflection of the opinions of the UT Staff nor the UT itself.
On April 29, the Supreme Court delivered a 6-3 decision on Louisiana v. Callais, which determined that a Louisiana district had relied too heavily on race while drawing its electoral map.
This decision garnered different reactions directly along party lines. President Donald Trump and several other Republican figures celebrated the decision, while Democrats signaled that this would be a major setback for African American and Latino voters across the country.
In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch) called it an “unconstitutional gerrymander.” Further, Alito said, “Allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.” In their dissent, Justice Elena Kagan (who was joined by both Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor) stated, “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.”
The case, Louisiana v. Callais, centered on electoral maps in the state created after the 2020 census, which had found that the state had counted that one-third of the state’s population was Black. Despite this, the state legislature continued using a map that had five white majority districts and only one Black district. Black voters challenged this map, and in 2022, a US District judge ruled that the map had violated the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and ordered the legislature to use a new map, which created a second, majority Black district.
This decision was then challenged by Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, who went to the Fifth Circuit court for a stay (essentially a pause on the order), but was denied. Ardoin then turned to the Supreme Court, which issued a stay until they made a decision in a similar case, Allen v. Milligan, playing out in Alabama. Following a decision that ruled that Alabama had violated the VRA, the original ruling was allowed to play out in Louisiana, and the state adopted a new map ahead of the 2024 election.
Following that decision, a group of white voters filed a suit to block the new maps, claiming that the districts had been racially gerrymandered, therefore violating both the 14th and 15th amendments. The case was then reviewed by a panel of three federal district judges who voted 2-1 that the maps had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered. This led the state to ask for a stay from the Supreme Court, as the decision was reached too close to the then-upcoming 2024 elections for the legislature to draw a new map. The court agreed to this, but declined to comment directly on the merits of the panel’s decisions.
While the case was originally argued during the Court’s 2024-2025 term, a hold was placed on oral arguments on June 27, 2025, and picked back up on Oct. 15, 2025. During the downtime, the Supreme Court ordered all parties to submit supplemental briefs, addressing whether or not Section 2 of the VRA violated the 14th and 15th amendments. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh voted in favor of the district court’s panel that had determined the maps to be racially gerrymandered.
This entire saga arrives as gerrymandering in favor of both Democrats and Republicans continues across the country ahead of this November’s midterms, and less than a week after a successful Democrat referendum in Virginia to redraw the state’s maps ahead of the midterms.
The VRA was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965, and outlawed discriminatory voting practices that were upheld in southern states after the Civil War. Section 2 specifically states that the act “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified in Section 4(f)(2) of the Act.”
Now that the table has been set, let’s get into our views on the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act.
Samuel Valencia: The conservative majority on the Supreme Court shows once again that they do not have the best intentions of all American people in mind.
Making it harder for minorities to vote across the country is exactly up this administration’s alley, so it’s not really any surprise that it supports this decision. Anything to cling to, whatever power they have left, assuming there is anything to cling to if the Democrats win big at the end of the year.
Ever since Donald Trump managed to sneak in Amy Coney Barrett before the end of his first term, the Supreme Court has been an extension of the Republican Party more so than any other Supreme Court before it.
Their decisions, like the choice to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, highlight the fact that the highest court in the land operates like it owes a deep allegiance to the man who delivered them so much power: Donald Trump. Sure, once in a while, they’ll throw liberals a bone, like when they decided that Trump’s tariff plan was unconstitutional. But ever since 2020, this court has actively acted against the American people.
It’s not like the people also elected them; the president has a nearly unblockable ability to decide the fate of the court, and the American people simply have to accept who he chooses. Trump crafted the makeup of a court that is consistently targeting civil liberties one at a time, and there’s practically nothing that we can do about it.
Democrats need to stack the court, and that should be seen as the moderate position as we head into the 2028 election. Any politician running on anything less than that should be disregarded. It’s high time that the Democratic Party stops playing fair against an opponent who clearly has no interest in following the rules.
There’s a pretty heavy stigma surrounding the idea of stacking the court, but if any Democrat president wants any hope of ensuring that their policy survives another Republican administration, this is the only way forward.
We could blame Trump for our current predicament, but we all know the truth: this goes all the way back to when the then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Barack Obama from appointing a new justice after the 2016 election. So, thanks Mitch, I hope you’re happy that you handed the keys to the castle to someone who has irrevocably changed the political landscape of the country that you purport to love.
As the war to gerrymander this country to hell and back plays out, one can only hope that the Democrats who are actually listening to the will of the people continue to listen to and observe the minority voters. Listen to those who are consistently finding themselves the target of this administration. That is their only ticket above the Republican party, and it’s one that they need to maintain at all times.
