5 things to know about the Supreme Court's landmark decision on the Voting Rights Act

In a landmark decision issued Wednesday, the Supreme Court, in Louisiana v. Callais, struck down Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district and held that race-conscious redistricting under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unconstitutional.

The 6-3 ruling does more than reshape one state's map. It marks a fundamental shift in the constitutional understanding of equality, voting rights, and Congress' power to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments.

Here are five things to know about the decision -- and what it means.

1. Race-conscious remedies are now constitutional violations

For more than four decades, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act operated on a straightforward principle: when electoral systems produce racially discriminatory results, they violate federal law -- even absent proof of discriminatory intent.

In Louisiana, where Black residents make up roughly one-third of the population, a federal court found that a post-2020 map with only one majority-Black district likely diluted Black voting power. The legislature responded by drawing a second majority-Black district, as courts have required in similar circumstances.

The Supreme Court has now declared that remedy unconstitutional. By holding that the intentional creation of a majority-minority district violates the Equal Protection Clause, the Court turned Section 2's logic on its head. The very act of correcting racial vote dilution, the court's majority concluded, constitutes impermissible racial sorting.

In doing so, the Court effectively constitutionalized a "colorblindness" principle that forbids race-conscious solutions--even when addressing proven racial discrimination in voting.

2. Section 2: The VRA's last operational safeguard is essentially gone

Thirteen years ago, in Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion invalidating the Voting Rights Act's preclearance formula, disabling the requirement that jurisdictions with histories of discrimination obtain federal approval before changing voting laws. The Court assured the public that Section 2 remained as a backstop.

That backstop is now gone in any meaningful sense for redistricting cases.

Section 2's "disparate impact" framework -- adopted by Congress in 1982 precisely because discriminatory intent is so easily concealed -- required courts to examine results, not rhetoric. When racially polarized voting combined with district lines to prevent minority communities from electing candidates of choice, courts could require states to draw additional opportunity districts.

By ruling that such race-conscious compliance is unconstitutional, the Court has hollowed out Section 2's central enforcement mechanism. The statute remains on the books, but its most powerful application has been stripped away.

3. Chief Justice Roberts: A decision decades in the making

The decision is not an isolated doctrinal shift. It is the fulfillment of a project that dates back to Roberts' early career.

As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Roberts criticized the Voting Rights Act's reliance on discriminatory effects rather than discriminatory intent. In internal memoranda, he argued that Section 2 went "beyond" the Constitution by regulating practices that merely resulted in racial disparities. The concern was not the persistence of discrimination but Congress' aggressive response to it.

That view never changed. In Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts wrote that "things have changed in the South," concluding that extraordinary federal oversight was no longer justified. The consequences were swift: states enacted restrictive voting laws, redrew districts and altered procedures in ways that disproportionately burdened voters of color.

With Louisiana v. Callais, Roberts has achieved what he began advocating decades ago. By declaring that race-conscious redistricting remedies themselves violate equal protection, the Court has dismantled what remained of the Voting Rights Act's practical force.

It is, in that sense, Roberts' signature achievement.

4. Reinterpreting the Reconstruction Amendments

The case hinged on a profound constitutional disagreement. The 14th and 15th Amendments were adopted after the Civil War to secure equal citizenship and protect formerly enslaved people from racial discrimination, particularly in voting. Congress was explicitly empowered to enforce those guarantees.

The Court's majority framed Section 2 as being "in tension" with equal protection because it requires consideration of race. That framing treats the Constitution as forbidding the very race-conscious measures designed to fulfill its promises.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the majority's approach risks unraveling decades of civil rights protections.

"That is racial vote dilution in its most classic form," Kagan wrote. "A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—'cracked' is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence. Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests.

The dissent emphasized that ignoring the real-world operation of racial discrimination does not produce neutrality -- it entrenches inequality. The Constitution, she argued, permits Congress to confront discrimination as it actually functions, not merely as it appears in sanitized legislative records.

By prioritizing formal colorblindness over substantive equality, the Court has recast the Reconstruction Amendments from tools of inclusion into constraints on remediation.

5. The consequences: Not limited to Louisiana

The impact of Louisiana v. Callais will not be confined to one state. Without enforceable Section 2 protections in redistricting, legislatures face far fewer federal constraints on drawing maps that dilute minority voting strength -- particularly in jurisdictions with extreme racial polarization in voting patterns.

Analysts warn that up to a quarter or more of the Congressional Black Caucus and roughly a tenth of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus could be affected by map changes that would previously have triggered Section 2 scrutiny. Beyond Congress, the ruling will influence state legislative, local, and school board districts nationwide.

The doctrinal ripple effects may extend even further. Disparate-impact standards also underpin other civil rights statutes, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act. If the Constitution is now read to forbid governmental responses to racial disparities absent proof of intent, long-settled enforcement frameworks could face renewed challenges.

The bottom line

The Voting Rights Act was not merely a statute. It was a national commitment to meaningful political participation and vigilance against racial exclusion.

By striking down Louisiana's second majority-Black district and declaring race-conscious redistricting under Section 2 unconstitutional, the Supreme Court has repudiated that commitment. The Court insists it is safeguarding equality. Critics argue it has disarmed one of the nation's most effective tools for achieving it.

What remains is a constitutional order in which structural discrimination must be proven through intent alone -- and where remedies that once defined the modern civil rights era are now suspect under the very amendments they were designed to enforce.

James Sample is an ABC News legal contributor and a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of ABC News or The Walt Disney Company.