The Supreme Court's 6-3 Ruling Against Racial Gerrymandering
WSJ Opinion: Potomac Watch
The Wall Street Journal
4.2 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
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| 0:32.3 | From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. |
| 0:40.1 | The Supreme Court rules 6.3 to limit the judiciary's ability to order racial gerrymandering under the Voting Rights Act |
| 0:46.0 | to create minority-majority House seats. One of the justices say, which states might now |
| 0:51.6 | redo their district maps, and how might this affect the nation's |
| 0:54.8 | political debate in the years to come? Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal. |
| 1:00.7 | We are joined today by my colleagues on the WSJ's opinion pages, columnist Alicia Finley and Kim Strassel. |
| 1:09.2 | For decades, the lower courts have struggled to figure out how and |
| 1:13.1 | whether and when to order states to gerrymander by race. And the district maps that issue in |
| 1:18.3 | Louisiana v. Calais are a case in point. After the 2020 census, the state created a map that |
| 1:25.3 | had one black majority district centered on New Orleans. |
| 1:29.3 | One court said that Louisiana had violated the Voting Rights Act because it should have drawn two |
| 1:34.6 | minority-majority districts. The state complied by creating a second district running from |
| 1:39.9 | Baton Rouge to Shreveport, but then a second court said that that map was too influenced by racial considerations and it violated the Constitution. |
| 1:49.7 | On Wednesday, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court said that Louisiana was never required in the first place to create that second minority-majority district district while tightening the standard for such |
| 2:02.7 | claims in federal courts. |
| 2:04.9 | Alicia, what is your read of what this ruling says? |
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