The stakes are high for voting rights as the Supreme Court once again addresses a redistricting dispute in Louisiana

WASHINGTON — The rampant racial discrimination in elections that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is all in the past, Louisiana Republican leaders say.

That’s why they’re now urging the Supreme Court, in a case being argued Wednesday, to bar states from using any consideration of race when drawing legislative districts, effectively striking down a key provision of the law that was designed to ensure Black voters get a chance to elect their preferred candidates.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Morell told NBC News that the Voting Rights Act was designed to address blatantly discriminatory policies and practices that have prevented Black people and other minorities from voting for decades.

“I think the question now is: Have we reached a point where those obstacles no longer really exist?” She said. “I don’t think they exist in Louisiana,” she added.

The issue concerns the congressional district map that Louisiana reluctantly redrew last year after it was sued under the Voting Rights Act to ensure two majority-black districts. The original map only had one in a state where a third of the population is black, according to United States Census.

The state’s new legal argument, which may appeal to the majority-conservative Supreme Court, is that drawing a map to guarantee majority-black districts violates the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which were enacted after the Civil War to ensure former slaves had equal rights under the law, including the right to vote.

Conservatives say these amendments prohibit any consideration of race at any time, and the Supreme Court has previously embraced this “color-blind” interpretation of the Constitution.

Civil rights activists say this approach makes a mockery of the post-Civil War amendments and the Voting Rights Act, not to mention their experience on the ground in Louisiana.

Bryce Robinson, one of the plaintiffs who challenged Louisiana’s original congressional map, said he had to file a lawsuit in 1974 just so he could take his place as an elected official on the East Baton Rouge school board.

“Has Louisiana really changed? I don’t see that,” he told reporters in a recent phone call.

The case reached the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, just two years after it surprisingly rejected a similar attempt to weaken the Voting Rights Act in another redistricting case.

But the court struck against the law in other rulings in 2013 and 2021.

In a 2023 case, the court rejected a congressional map drawn by Republicans in Alabama on the grounds that it discriminated against black voters, leading to a new map that included two majority-black districts.

The vote was 5 to 4, with two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joining the court’s three liberals in the majority. Four other governors objected.

At Wednesday’s oral argument, Kavanaugh will be the focus of attention, in part because of what he said in his separate concurring opinion in the Alabama case.

Although Kavanaugh voted for the majority, he expressed some sympathy with the argument that even if race could once have been considered a factor in ensuring compliance with the Voting Rights Act, it can no longer be.

But he added: “Alabama has not raised that interim argument in this court, so I will not consider it at this time.”

Now, based on Kavanaugh’s opinion, Louisiana lawyers are eagerly embracing the argument that Alabama has not made.

Among other things, Louisiana points to the court’s 2023 ruling that ended consideration of race in college admissions, which was issued just three weeks after the voting rights ruling in Alabama.

Chris Keyser, a lawyer at the right-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation, which is supporting Louisiana in the case, said in an interview that the upshot of the ruling in favor of the state is that there can be no obligation to intentionally draw majority-black districts.

“Districts should not be drawn based on the expected race of the congressman they represent,” he said.

This could lead to a decline in the number of legislators at the national and state levels who are black or Latino.

In that scenario, minority voters would still be able to file separate racial gerrymandering claims under the Constitution if there was clear racial discrimination, Kiser said, although such cases would be difficult to win.

Depending on what the court does, the Voting Rights Act provision in question, known as Section 2, could survive on a limited basis.

A ruling that reduces black majority areas and other minorities will have an impact Partisan influence This could favor Republicans, as black voters have historically favored Democrats. If the court rules quickly, there is a possibility that new maps will be drawn before the hotly contested 2026 midterm elections.

The case has a complicated history, stemming from litigation over a previous map drawn by the state Legislature after the 2020 census that included one majority Black district among the state’s six counties.

The state drew the current map in order to comply with that ruling, but was then sued by a group of self-identified “non-African American” voters, who claimed that the state, in seeking to comply with the Voting Rights Act, violated the Constitution.

The Supreme Court heard the current case earlier this year over a narrower set of legal issues but, in an unusual move, in June asked the parties to reconsider it. Over the summer, the court raised the stakes by requiring lawyers to focus on the constitutional issue.

As a result of this complex background, the various briefs filed in this case — including those filed by the Trump administration in support of Louisiana — make a number of different legal arguments.

That makes it difficult to know what the justices will focus on before Wednesday’s oral argument, said Sophia Lynn Lakin, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is part of the legal team defending Louisiana’s latest map.

“It’s very strange. Normally, we would always understand the question we are trying to answer,” she said.

Len Lakin doesn’t believe the case should be used as a vehicle for an “all-out assault” on the Voting Rights Act.

But she acknowledged that “there is some risk in the way the matter is presented that the court may be interested in this larger question.”