Welcome back to The Gavel, where we’re unpacking the most important civil rights and civil liberties cases before the Supreme Court and breaking down their implications for Vermont.
In our last issue, we described how cases reach the Supreme Court and took a deep dive into Chiles v. Salazar, where a therapist is challenging a Colorado law banning conversion therapy on minors. This week, we’re looking at a case that could profoundly damage our voting rights—but first, let’s talk about the wild world of oral arguments, where both sides desperately parry all the Court’s questions and hypotheticals.
All things oral arguments
When do arguments start and end?
The first argument day of a Supreme Court term is always the first Monday in October, and arguments are usually scheduled through the end of April. Arguments are typically held Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, often with two scheduled in a day. The Supreme Court calendar tells you what will be argued when.
How do oral arguments work?
Both sides usually get 30 minutes, starting with the Petitioner (also called the appellant, or the side that requested Supreme Court review the case) and followed by the Respondent (also called the appellee, or the party that won in the court below and doesn’t want to be here). If the Petitioner asked to “reserve time for rebuttal,” they’ll get less time at the beginning but can use the reserved time to get the final word after the Respondent’s turn.
The Petitioner and the Respondent both begin with "Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court…" and get to deliver a two-minute opening statement before the justices are allowed to interrupt. Then, there’s a white light on the podium that signals the questions can begin. The Chief Justice can ask the first question, although Chief Justice Roberts often defers to Justice Thomas, who’s been on the Court longer. The justices can ask anything they like and do so in a freeform style.
Next, a red light moves the Court on to the final round. The justices can now ask questions in order of seniority, taking turns and cycling through from Chief Justice Roberts to Justice Jackson. Justices can (and do) interrupt the attorneys at any time. As soon as a justice begins speaking, the attorney is expected to zip their lips; it’s considered very disrespectful for an attorney to interrupt a justice, even when the justice has just interrupted them.
Has it always been this way?
The two-minute uninterrupted opening and justice turn-taking are actually relatively new changes. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, arguments were more of a free-for-all, with attorneys vulnerable to questions as soon as they got to the podium. But remote oral arguments during the pandemic required a new structure to reduce interruptions and miscommunications.
According to Justice Sotomayor, this change was also partly a response to new research that showed female justices were interrupted significantly more by male justices and male advocates. Chief Justice Roberts, says Justice Sotomayor, took that very seriously (although before the change, Justice Sotomayor noted she would often just “interrupt back”). The new structure has lessened interruptions and resulted in more input from the famously reticent Justice Clarence Thomas, a master of the silent treatment who once went a decade without asking a single question from the bench.
Can attorneys talk about any part of the case they want at oral argument?
Yes and no. Oral arguments are not the time to introduce or riff on new legal points or try to introduce new facts. Instead, Court rules explain that attorneys should use oral arguments to “emphasize and clarify the written arguments” that they made in their briefs. After their two-minute opener, they should be prepared to respond to the justices’ questions—and the justices have no problem holding attorneys’ feet to the fire if they feel like the attorney is trying to dodge. The rebuttal is meant as an opportunity to counter any points Respondent made, not pitch new off-topic arguments.
Can I watch oral arguments?
Yes, but not online. You can go in-person to the Supreme Court, but be prepared: although all sessions are open to the public, seating is on a first-come basis and is very limited. For the marquee arguments, the line usually starts early in the morning (or even the night before). You can also try entering the Supreme Court’s new online ticket lottery to snag a seat in advance. For remote court watchers, argument audio is live-streamed on the Court’s website.
Real talk: do oral arguments really affect the outcome of a case?
Maybe? Oral arguments are meant to explore thorny legal issues and allow justices to probe different arguments. In some cases, it can feel like the justices are pointedly talking to each other through the questions they ask the attorney—or are even feeding the attorney the arguments they want to hear. And during arguments, attorneys often make important clarifications or concessions that end up being cited in the Court’s decision, sometimes to their detriment.
Researchers love testing correlations between things like the number of questions a side gets and the ultimate outcome. But the post-argument conference, where the justices discuss the case with each other, is kept super-secret. And at the end of the day, the only insight we get into the Court’s thinking is the opinion it releases (and any press leaks along the way)—so your guess is as good as ours.
Now, let’s talk about the biggest voting rights case of this term (so far).
Louisiana v. Callais
Voting rights, racial justice
Question Presented: Whether Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Question Demystified: Louisiana, following lower court instructions to address racial gerrymandering in its voting maps, redrew its districting map to create a congressional district to place Black Louisianians on more equal footing in elections. But was drawing a new majority-Black district remedying racial discrimination—or, instead, another instance of racial discrimination itself? And since Louisiana’s map was an attempt to follow the requirements of the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”), is it unconstitutional to apply that part of the law to redistricting?
Facts & Case History
Voting rights cases are notoriously complex: they often are a duel between color-coded maps filled with funky-shaped districts put through a gauntlet of multi-step legal tests, and major civil rights implications can get overshadowed by statistics. But this case is a particular doozy, as the three main parties keep switching sides.
The story of this case began with the 2020 Census, which revealed that the proportion of Black Louisianans had grown to about a third of the state’s population. But when the Louisiana legislature redrew its six congressional districts, it settled on a map with only one district where Black Louisianians were in the majority. Louisiana voters (the “Robinson plaintiffs”) challenged this map in federal district court, arguing that it violated Section 2 of the VRA by diluting Black voters’ power by packing a substantial portion of the Black population into one district and spreading the rest over multiple districts. After a journey up to the court of appeals, to the Supreme Court, and back down again, the courts concluded that Louisiana’s original map was indeed likely an unlawful racial gerrymander, and Louisiana got its marching orders: draw a new map with a second majority-Black district, or the district court will do it for you.
Back to the drawing board, the Louisiana legislature reconvened with two goals. First, they (grudgingly) accepted that the new map needed a second district where Black Louisianans had sufficient voting power to comply with the courts’ rulings. But second, they wanted a map that would protect the seats of two of their most powerful incumbents. With these dealbreakers in mind, they rejected a map proposed by the Robinson plaintiffs because it didn’t meet their political goals and instead adopted a new map called “SB8.”
Nine days later, Louisiana got sued again. In this new lawsuit, a group of self-described “non-African-Americans” (the “Callais plaintiffs”) claimed that, by creating a second congressional district to empower Black voters, Louisiana had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Robinson plaintiffs—represented by the ACLU and the NAACP—rejoined the lawsuit, now supporting Louisiana’s new map.
By this point, Louisiana was ticked off: the state had been dragged back to court to defend a map it didn’t even want to make in the first place. At the Supreme Court, Louisiana and the Robinson plaintiffs teamed up, arguing that race wasn’t the predominant factor in SB8 (under prior Court cases, race is allowed to be a factor when drawing maps, just not the overriding factor). They explained that the state was just trying to follow the court orders and the VRA, and drawing maps to protect politicians is legal. The Callais plaintiffs disagreed, insisting that SB8 was a racial gerrymander and needed to be struck down.
But instead of issuing a decision, the Supreme Court threw the parties a curveball. A few months after oral argument, the Court asked for supplemental briefing on a new issue that the Callais plaintiffs mentioned in one of their court filings—putting aside whether race was the state’s #1 factor when redistricting, does considering race at all and intentionally creating a second “majority-minority” (i.e., majority Black) congressional district violate the Constitution?
By reframing the question, the Court transformed Louisiana v. Callais from a (comparatively) straightforward lawsuit about one map into a potentially devastating case for voting rights. To understand why, it’s necessary to recap a little history about the Voting Rights Act.
About the Voting Rights Act
Spurred by the Civil Rights Movement, Congress exercised its powers under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to pass the VRA in 1965, which codified protections against racial discrimination for voters across the country. The VRA transformed American elections, ending poll taxes and literacy tests that were designed to deny Black voters access to the ballot box. One important provision of the law, Section 2, prohibits voting policies and electoral maps that have the effect of racial discrimination, even where plaintiffs can’t prove that was the government’s intention (which can be extremely difficult to do). Successfully proving a Section 2 violation requires clearing a lot of hurdles (adorably named the Gingles preconditions from a 1968 SCOTUS case—but even so, across the country, courts have ordered changes to dozens of maps.
But now, the Court has put Section 2 in its crosshairs. Basically, the Court is asking whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits limiting voters’ rights based on race, actually leads to unconstitutional race-based redistricting.
Parties’ Arguments
In this new round of briefing with the question reframed, Louisiana and the Robinson plaintiffs (and by extension, the ACLU) broke up. Louisiana hadn’t ever wanted a second majority-Black congressional district, and the state jumped at the chance to scrap SB8 and return to its original map with just one Black-majority district. The state came out swinging, arguing that forcing it to create a second Black-majority district was a racial gerrymander, and that such race-based redistricting violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. Louisiana complains that Congress overstepped by crafting a law that doesn’t sufficiently require proof of ongoing discrimination, so Louisiana can never escape the shadow of the discrimination of its past, and it’s unfair that this law has no time limit. And it’s always unlawful for the state to factor race into decisions like redistricting, Louisiana asserts, and, in support, it points to recent cases where the Court limited affirmative action under similar reasoning.
Brazenly, Louisiana further claims that government racial clarifications are harmful stereotypes reinforcing the belief that we can judge people based on the color of their skin, and supports this statement with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. It’s pretty shameless to use the words of Dr. King to try to dismantle a part of the VRA when he was famously present when the VRA was signed into law and described it as a “great step forward.”
This time, the Callais plaintiffs are on Louisiana’s side. According to the Callais plaintiffs, considering race when redistricting fails “strict scrutiny,” the test triggered by disparate racial treatment that requires a state to narrowly tailor its approach to achieve a “compelling interest”. They read Court precedent to say that the only compelling interest justifying remedial redistricting is fixing specific instances of past discrimination—and just an interest in following the VRA, which Louisiana did here, doesn’t cut it. Besides, the Callais plaintiffs argue, even if Section 2 had been fine when first passed, it’s just not needed anymore: there’s no evidence in this case of specific racial discrimination currently in Louisiana.
The Robinson plaintiffs strongly disagree. Of course this provision doesn’t sunset, they reason—most civil rights laws don’t, and racial discrimination is still definitely happening in Louisiana. The Robinson plaintiffs trace the history and importance of protecting voting rights in this country and insist that Congress was well within its constitutional authority to pass Section 2 of the VRA, so following that law is a compelling interest. And the courts have created specific requirements for Section 2 claims to ensure that there isn’t an excessive consideration of race, but if the Court thinks that race was weighed too heavily with SB8, the solution is not to rip apart an important civil rights law—just tell Louisiana and the courts below to make a new map.
Oral Argument Recap
The oral arguments in this case were partly a battle between precedent. Louisiana and the Callais plaintiffs claimed that this case is like the affirmative action cases, where the Court struck down the practice of considering race in school admissions. That’s a completely different context, the Robinson plaintiffs argued; this case is like Allen v. Milligan, an ACLU case from 2023 where the Court found that Section 2 did not require the state (Alabama, in that case) to excessively consider race in redistricting.
For some of the justices, the question of intent versus impact was a big hangup. Section 2 requires a showing of discriminatory effects, not necessarily that racial bias drove the decisions. But Justice Jackson seemed particularly unimpressed with Louisiana’s and Callais’ response. The state “obviously” has a compelling interest in remedying the effects of past racial discrimination; why should it matter, she demanded of Louisiana, whether that discrimination was intentional or not? Or, as she asked the Callais plaintiffs, “Is your suggestion that the only thing that’s worthy of remedying is the intentional discrimination by the State?”
But other justices seemed equally skeptical of the Robinson plaintiffs’ arguments. Justice Alito was concerned whether permissible political considerations could actually be driving effects that merely look like racial discrimination. Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch had several questions about how heavily race could be used when remedying a Section 2 violation.
Overall, the arguments presented two very different ways of viewing the state of the country: either Louisiana has completely freed itself from any taint of the past, or Black Louisianans are still being disempowered by a long history of discrimination. How the justices see the present will certainly influence what protections they deem necessary going forward.
Consequences
The Voting Rights Act is one of the most impactful pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history and a crucial legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, enshrining our national promise of equal representation and fair voting in the law. And for decades, Section 2 of the VRA has been the bulwark against racially discriminatory districting specifically. That protection is now on the chopping block. If Louisiana and the Callais plaintiffs succeed, it will become even harder for voters to challenge racially gerrymandered maps in court.
Because Vermont is tiny (population-wise, only Wyoming is smaller), we get only one congressional delegate in the House of Representatives along with our requisite two senators, so our whole state is basically one district. This means federal congressional redistricting isn’t a thing for us. But 44 other states do have multiple districts, and obviously, national laws like the VRA that affect the composition of legislative branch—the part of the federal government that makes laws that apply to all of us—have a profound impact on Vermonters too.
Essentially, when district maps don’t accurately represent our country, neither does Congress. If the voting rights at issue here are gutted, everyone can still vote, but racially gerrymandered districts too often result in Black voters having less power. That means many American voices are being denied equal representation and silenced from the lawmaking process, further entrenching the inequities we see across so many systems in our country (like healthcare, immigration enforcement, education, etc.). Ignoring racial discrimination doesn’t make discrimination go away—instead, this case could eliminate an important tool to combat it.