Clarence Thomas used the Court’s latest Voting Rights Act decision to restate a position he has held for decades—and to push it further than the majority was willing to go.
Writing separately in the Louisiana case, Thomas argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act should not apply to redistricting at all. His reasoning is rooted in a strict reading of the statute’s text.
In his view, the law is designed to prevent barriers to casting a ballot—things like discriminatory procedures or access restrictions—not to govern how states draw congressional maps. That distinction has been at the center of his disagreement with the Court’s broader voting rights jurisprudence since the 1990s.
He described prior rulings that allowed Section 2 challenges to district maps as a “misadventure,” arguing they have pushed states toward race-based decision-making rather than away from it.
According to Thomas, requiring or encouraging the creation of majority-minority districts forces lawmakers to sort voters by race, which he sees as incompatible with a “color-blind” reading of the Constitution.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, moved in the same direction but stopped short of Thomas’ endpoint. The Court ruled that Louisiana’s map—specifically its majority-Black district—was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, finding the state did not have a sufficient justification for drawing lines so heavily based on race.
At the same time, the majority did not eliminate Section 2’s role in redistricting cases altogether. Instead, it narrowed how and when race can be considered.
That gap between the majority and Thomas is significant. While the ruling makes it harder for states to defend race-conscious districting, Thomas’ approach would remove that legal framework entirely, effectively shutting down a major category of Voting Rights Act litigation.
The dissent, led by Justice Elena Kagan, reads the decision—and Thomas’ concurrence—as a sharp contraction of protections that have been used to challenge maps diluting minority voting strength. Kagan argued that the Court’s reasoning leaves states with far more leeway to redraw districts in ways that could weaken minority representation without triggering legal consequences.
