The Milligan Mirage: Why the Supreme Court’s Block of Louisiana’s VRA Map Paralyzes Election Law Practice

The Death of the Section 2 Safe Harbor

For a brief, shining moment in 2023, the voting rights bar thought Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) had survived the Roberts Court. In Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023), a surprising majority upheld the decades-old framework for identifying unlawful vote dilution, forcing Alabama to draw a second Black-majority district. Civil rights litigators exhaled; state attorneys general begrudgingly advised their legislatures to comply. The rules of the game, it seemed, remained intact.

We were wrong. The Supreme Court’s April 29, 2026, order blocking Louisiana’s map—which featured a second Black-majority congressional district—shatters the illusion of stability. By halting a map designed specifically to cure a VRA defect, the Court has weaponized the Equal Protection Clause against the VRA itself, trapping state legislatures and election lawyers in an inescapable constitutional paradox.

The Fourteenth Amendment Trap

To understand why this development is a nightmare for practicing election lawyers, you have to understand the fundamental tension in modern redistricting litigation. Under Section 2 of the VRA, 52 U.S.C. § 10301, and the Supreme Court’s seminal ruling in Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986), states must consider race to draw majority-minority districts when minority voters are sufficiently numerous, compact, and politically cohesive, and when racially polarized voting would otherwise defeat their preferred candidates.

But under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, as interpreted since Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993), states are strictly forbidden from letting race "predominate" in the line-drawing process without satisfying strict scrutiny.

For years, the Supreme Court provided a practical safe harbor: if a state had "good reasons" to believe the VRA required drawing a minority district, that compliance justified the race-conscious line-drawing. The April 2026 Louisiana order effectively closes that harbor. Louisiana drew a second Black-majority district to satisfy the very VRA mandates the Court supposedly preserved in Milligan. Yet, when conservative plaintiffs challenged the new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, the Court intervened to block it.

"The Court has engineered a jurisprudential catch-22. If a state ignores racially polarized voting, it gets sued under Section 2 of the VRA. If it draws a district to remedy that dilution, it gets sued under the Equal Protection Clause. The Louisiana order signals that the latter will now consistently trump the former."

What Changes in Practice?

For lawyers on the ground, the immediate practical implications of the Louisiana block are seismic.

1. The Plaintiffs' Playbook is Paralyzed:
Civil rights litigators relying on Gingles can no longer just prove the three preconditions and expect a remedy. Even if you win a Section 2 liability finding, the state (or intervenors) can now successfully block the resulting remedial map by claiming the cure is a racial gerrymander. You are fighting a two-front war where the Supreme Court has heavily thumbed the scale for the defense on the second front. Expect to see VRA plaintiffs spending vastly more resources on non-racial justifications for remedial maps—such as communities of interest, socioeconomic data, and geographic compactness—to proactively defend against the inevitable Fourteenth Amendment counter-strike.

2. State AGs Have a Golden Shield:
If you are advising a Republican-controlled state legislature, the strategy is now explicitly clear: litigate the VRA to the hilt, and if you lose, invite a racial gerrymandering challenge to the remedial map. The Louisiana precedent tells lower courts that race-conscious VRA remedies are constitutionally suspect, even when drawn to cure a proven Section 2 violation. This will embolden states to drag their feet during the remedial phase, running out the clock until the Purcell principle (preventing federal courts from changing election rules too close to an election) locks in the original, dilutive maps.

3. The End of Bipartisan Map Approvals:
Historically, some state legislatures settled VRA lawsuits by agreeing to redraw lines to avoid costly litigation and fee-shifting under 42 U.S.C. § 1988. The Louisiana block destroys the incentive to settle. Any settlement resulting in a new minority district is now a sitting duck for a collateral Equal Protection challenge by disgruntled voters.

The Quiet Death of the VRA

The Roberts Court did not need to explicitly overturn Allen v. Milligan to gut the Voting Rights Act. By weaponizing the racial gerrymandering doctrine against VRA compliance in Louisiana, the Court has achieved the same result through the back door.

Practitioners must recognize the new reality: Section 2 is no longer a mandate; it is a liability trap. When courts elevate "colorblind" mapmaking over the statutory requirement to prevent minority vote dilution, the VRA ceases to function as a remedial tool. The Louisiana order is not just a localized map dispute—it is the blueprint for how the conservative legal movement will dismantle the remaining pillars of the Voting Rights Act, one remedial map at a time.