AMNA NAWAZ: Welcome to the "News Hour."

The U.S.

Supreme Court today struck down one of Louisiana's majority-Black congressional districts, a decision that weakens key protections under the Voting Rights Act.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court's conservative majority found that Louisiana's Sixth District, which links Black communities across the state, relied too heavily on race in its design.

GEOFF BENNETT: Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito called the map an unconstitutional gerrymander.

The decision could open the door to broader legal challenges over majority Black and Latino districts across the country and give states new latitude to redraw maps in ways that could shift the balance of political power.

Louisiana Democratic Congressman Troy Carter said the impact of the ruling will extend far beyond his state.

REP.

TROY CARTER (D-LA): This is about our democracy.

And I implore everyone who's out there to recognize that, if you care about justice, freedom, and fair elections, you should be as upset as we are.

GEOFF BENNETT: We are joined now by Amy Howe, "News Hour" Supreme Court analyst and co-founder of SCOTUSblog, and Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter.

It's great to have the both of you here.

So, Amy Howe, we will start with you.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, long been considered a cornerstone of protections against racial discrimination in voting past, during the height of the civil rights movement, expanded by Congress thereafter, given that history, help us understand exactly what the court ruled today.

AMY HOWE: So the court did two things.

First, as the introduction suggested, it struck down this map that Louisiana drew in 2024 that created a second majority-Black district in Louisiana.

And it had done that in response to a court ruling in a case that had been brought by Black voters arguing that Louisiana had violated the Voting Rights Act when it drew a map in 2022, because that map only had one majority-Black district.

And those voters said that Louisiana had diluted their votes, that they had cracked and packed, the voting rights terminology goes, Black voters.

And so it struck that -- it struck the 2024 map down, which was intended to address the Voting Rights Act violation.

And then in the process of getting to that conclusion, the court articulated a new test or, as Justice Samuel Alito put it, writing for the majority, updated its old test for determining whether or not a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in voting, exists.

And it said, if plaintiffs want to allege that there is a violation of Section 2, they need to show that there is intentional discrimination on behalf of the state when it's drawing these kinds of maps.

GEOFF BENNETT: And, Amy Walter, what's the political impact of all of this?

We know that Texas and Virginia have implemented new highly contested congressional maps.

Florida, for instance, just passed a new congressional map today that could net them up to four more Republican seats.

What comes next?

AMY WALTER, The Cook Political Report: Yes, I think there's the short term and then the long term.

In the short term, the timing of this decision is a little bit awkward for the 2026 midterms.

Most states have already closed their candidate filings, so it's not possible for candidates to just suddenly decide that they want to run.

So if states are going to reopen redistricting, they're going to have to move that deadline and, in some cases, maybe even move the primary.

So the appetite from legislators and governors, we don't quite know where that is at this point.

Right now, it seems like there are a couple of states that may be open to doing such a thing, either moving their deadlines and bringing the legislature back.

A state like Tennessee is being talked about a lot, which could net Republicans one seat.

But I think the bigger picture here is that the state of the 2026 midterms unlikely to be as impacted by this decision as the 2028 election will be.

There's little doubt that this opens the door now for governors and legislators in Republican states in the South, like Mississippi and Alabama, I mentioned South Carolina, to go in, redraw maps that would take those what are now majority-Black democratic districts and basically draw maps that have entirely Republican delegations.

GEOFF BENNETT: Our team earlier today spoke with Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

That organization argued in favor of keeping the current maps.

And she said that the ruling today upends voting protections entirely.

JANAI NELSON, President and Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund: I'm horrified that our Supreme Court has trampled not only on the rights of Congress to enact legislation pursuant to its powers under the Constitution, not only trampling on the principle of adhering to its own precedent, which would have dictated that we should win outright in this case, but also trampling on the right to vote as severely as it did today.

GEOFF BENNETT: And Nelson also said that racial groups, Black voters, Latino voters, the growing Asian population in this country, will have no path to challenge what they see as discriminatory maps.

There's no path to accountability.

And, Amy Howe, technically, the Supreme Court kept Section 2 in place.

Is that meaningful or just cover?

AMY HOWE: So, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, wrote a concurring opinion, and he would have struck down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act altogether.

But, as you say, the rest of the justices said that Section 2 is still in place.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissenting opinion in the case.

She was joined by the court's other two Democratic appointees, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

And Justice Kagan actually read her dissent from the bench, which is a sign of how strongly she disagreed with the court's decision today.

And she suggested that the court had really eviscerated the Voting Rights Act Section 2, even if it theoretically left it in place.

And what she said was, under the standard that the court announced today, where plaintiffs have to show essentially intentional discrimination on behalf of the state, she said that's going to be basically impossible for plaintiffs to show going forward.

So I think it is very fair to say that it weakens it.

GEOFF BENNETT: And we should explain Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race.

Our team also spoke with the conservative legal scholar Hans Von Spakovsky, who agrees with the court's decision today.

He says that we live in a very different world than we did when the Voting Rights Act was initially enacted.

HANS VON SPAKOVSKY, Former Federal Election Commissioner: Conditions are just so changed today.

You have viable -- two viable political parties.

You have many instances where, for example, Black Americans have been elected to Congress, not in these majority-Black districts, but in white districts.

Why?

Because of the party they're in.

And that again brings up that party affiliation is the probably most important factor in whether people get elected or not.

GEOFF BENNETT: What do you make of that?

AMY WALTER: The argument is that you can't draw a partisan map, especially when it comes to Black voters, without drawing a racially gerrymandered map.

As long as Black voters are voting overwhelmingly, 90 percent, for Democrats, the two really are basically one in the same.

But it is true, yes, there are Black lawmakers in this country that represent districts that are not majority-Black, but not in the South.

And so what you're going to see in places like Alabama or South Carolina or Georgia, which have significant Black populations, it's not going to -- the representation from those states is unlikely to come from an African-American member of Congress.

The other thing I want to point out too is Democrats also have their own challenges with this as well.

They are arguing that they will go and try to do their own redraws, which may require them to go into majority -- in Democratic states, into majority-minority districts, and diffuse those voters in order to drop more Democratic seats.

That could also put other Democratic lawmakers in blue states who happen to be African-American or Latino in a more difficult position to win.

GEOFF BENNETT: Amy Howe, in the time that remains, I want to ask you about the oral arguments today, because the Supreme Court heard one of the most consequential immigration cases of this term.

It's a challenge to the Trump administration's efforts to strip temporary protected status from tens of thousands of Syrian and Haitian nationals living in the U.S.

What were the takeaways?

AMY HOWE: So, it was actually a case in which the justices were somewhat difficult to read.

Some of the justices didn't ask that many questions.

This was a case going in, in which we sort of expected that the conservative justices would be likely to be sympathetic to the Trump administration.

A lot of the time was spent discussing whether or not these are the kinds of claims that courts can review at all.

The Trump administration is arguing that the statute that created this program contains a provision that bars courts from weighing in at all.

So the three Democratic appointees spent a lot of time in particular on that.

I think that the question of whether or not courts can weigh in and whether or not the challengers could prevail if they can will ultimately depend on the chief justice and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

And this is one in which we are not likely to learn the answer, I imagine, until probably late June or early July.

GEOFF BENNETT: Amy Howe, Amy Walter, thank you both.

We appreciate it.

AMY HOWE: You're welcome.

AMY WALTER: Thank you.