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From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

The Supreme Court hears a case on racial gerrymandering and majority minority districts in Louisiana.

What's at stake for the law in the Constitution?

And are the analysts right about how a ruling in this case could change the balance of power in the House of Representatives?

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues on the editorial page, columnists Alicia Finley, and Barton Swain.

For years, state mapmakers have been caught between Iraq and a hard place.

And what happened in Louisiana after the 2020 census is a good example. First, the state drew a

house map that included one majority minority district. It was sued. A judge ruled that it was

required to have two majority minority districts under the Voting Rights Act because black voters are about 30% of Louisiana's population.

Then after it did that and drew a second such district, it was sued again by non-Black voters, arguing that this racial mapmaking was a violation of the Constitution

and the Equal Protection Clause.

Let's start with a clip of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, tangling with one of the attorneys this

morning in the oral argument on this case.

This court's cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time,

sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be

indefinite and should have an endpoint. And what exactly do you think the endpoint should be or how

would we know for the intentional use of race to create districts? Well, Justice Kavanaugh, you raised a very

important distinction, and that's between remedies and the statute. So a race-based remedy can and should

and usually does have a time limit and a durational limit. Section 2, court-ordered remedies have a time

...