WASHINGTON — In most Voting Rights Acts cases, minority voters are suing their state leaders, not on their side. But for awhile, a cadre of Black voters and Louisiana officials were both defending the state’s current Congressional map in the Callais case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But they are unusual bedfellows no more.

State Attorney General Liz Murrill switched sides Aug. 27 and argues the Voting Rights Act no longer justifies two Black congressional districts. The case is set for a hearing on Oct. 15.

Originally, justices wanted to hear arguments in Louisiana v. Callais on how to balance the competing requirements of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows minority-majority election districts, and the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution, which forbids decisions based on race.

But then the high court asked on Aug. 1 for the parties to focus on “whether the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” Murrill says that allowed the state to revert to its position before all the litigation that has led to this moment.

Louisiana has “attempted to expand the question beyond what the court has asked, and they argue that Section 2 is not constitutional at all, anywhere,” said the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Stuart Naifeh, who will argue before the high court. “We are having to defend not only the map that the state drew … but also defending the Voting Rights Act against arguments that it is no longer constitutional.”

Naifeh and his clients argue the Voting Rights Act is still necessary to protect the rights of Black voters.

“Has Louisiana really changed? I don’t see it,” said Press Robinson, who is the lead litigant among a group of Black voters.

About a third of the state’s residents are African American. The GOP majority Louisiana Legislature first drafted election maps that ensured the reelections of five White Republicans and a single Black Democrat.

“It was a clear dilution of Black voting power to crack Black voters from around the state and pack them into one district,” said Sarah Brannon, deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

The Robinson litigants argued under conditions in Louisiana, the Voting Rights Act allows state legislators to create a second district with enough minority voters to give Black voters an opportunity to elect one of their own to Congress.

Seven federal judges agreed.

Rather than accept maps drawn by the courts, the GOP-majority Louisiana Legislature in January 2024 configured a new map with two Black majority districts. Two weeks later, a dozen voters who described themselves as “non-African American” filed a lawsuit in Monroe.

The Callais litigants argue that the Legislature “first made the decision to impose the racial quota.” Even if VRA compliance was the Legislature’s true goal, then race was still the primary factor for drawing a second Black majority district, which is forbidden under the Equal Protection clause.

Two of the three judges on a federal panel agreed, leaving Louisiana caught between two rulings.

Should the justices decide that the enforcement mechanisms of Section 2 need to change, they have plenty of alternatives that would allow the VRA to continue protecting the rights of minority voters. But many legal commentators say Callais will allow the Supreme Court to gut the last significant civil rights protection.

That’s largely because of history.

Congress passed additional laws to enforce the protections enshrined in the Constitution. President Andrew Johnson, in the late 1860s, opposed many of those laws, saying they “operated in favor of the colored and against the White race,” wrote Leah Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. That is basically the same argument still used against civil rights legislation, she argued.

After nearly a century of state and local measures that limited employment, living conditions and voting rights of Black residents, Congress enacted the 1965 Voting Rights Act that included prohibitions such as poll taxes and tests that kept minorities off the voting rolls. Once those standards were eliminated, Congress expanded definitions of minority voter dilution as a means of enforcement.

“Race-based redistricting,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in 2023, “cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

But the point of the VRA is to ensure more voices, said Alana Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana.

For instance, because so many of the immigrants being deported by the Trump administration are in Louisiana facilities, the two Democratic congressmen elected under the current maps compelled discussion about conditions, she said.

“Majority-minority districts are not abstractions; they are lifelines for communities whose voices have been silenced for generations,” Odoms said.