Two years ago, the US Supreme Court surprised observers and even some inside the court when it narrowly preserved the 1965 Voting Rights Act and race-based remedies intended to counteract historic discrimination against Blacks and other minorities.

But new signals from the justices point to a potential reversal and suggest a looming retrenchment of the landmark civil rights law.

The court may be on the brink of forbidding the consideration of race in redistricting and eroding states’ ability to consolidate Blacks or other racial minorities into majority-minority congressional districts to boost their chance of electing a candidate of their choice.

The longstanding Voting Rights Act cure for discriminatory maps will be tested in a Louisiana case to be argued on Wednesday.

The controversy was originally heard last March, but the justices could not resolve it by the end of June when the 2024-2025 session ended. Rarely do the justices order new arguments. But when they do, they’ve been known to rule far more consequentially, as in the 2010 Citizens United case when the re-argument led to a decision giving corporations and labor unions new First Amendment rights to pump money into elections.

In the Louisiana redistricting fight, the court announced in August that it was expanding the legal question to squarely confront whether Voting Rights Act remedies tied to race and used for decades might violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

The eventual decision would affect the fate of candidates in Louisiana’s 2026 midterm elections and rev