As a practical matter, the issue in Louisiana v. Callais is not whether LA will have a second Voting Rights Act (VRA) district, in which black voters will have an equal opportunity to elect their candidate of choice. The issue is where in LA that district will be located. And if the Court invalidates the current district, that will cause significant political headaches for Republicans in LA and in Congress.

At an earlier stage of this litigation, the federal courts held that Section 2 of the VRA required LA to create a second VRA district. The plaintiffs had identified areas of the state in which a reasonably configured, second majority-black voting-age population could be created. But the LA legislature has no obligation to draw that district in the area the plaintiffs had identified; as long as it creates a second VRA district, it has complied with its VRA obligation.

Prior to this holding, Republicans held 5 of the 6 congressional seats. With the obligation to create a second VRA district, which inevitably would elect a Democrat, that meant one of these Republican incumbents would lose their seat. If the Republican legislature designed that district in the areas the plaintiffs had identified, it would have had to jeopardize the seat of the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, or the Majority Leader, Steve Scalise, or Rep. Julie Lettow.

Instead, the Republican legislature decided to eliminate an incumbent less popular among the Republican Party leadership, Rep. Garret Graves, from the Baton Rouge area. That’s why the legislature drew the current district that’s before the Supreme Court through the middle of the state. Graves was unpopular for many reasons, some of which this local story highlights. He opposed the current Republican Governor, Jeff Landry, in the last gubernatorial Republican primary, who was surely not unhappy to sign the bill eliminating Graves’ district; he was also a Kevin McCarthy supporter who was viewed as insufficiently supportive of Steve Scalise’s failed bid for House speaker.

If the Court strikes down LA’s attempt to create a second VRA district, while eliminating its least popular Republican incumbent, the LA legislature is still going to have to create that second VRA district. That will put the legislature back in the political position it was trying to avoid, in which it will have to figure out whether there is some other solution for its desire to protect its most powerful and most popular (with the party leadership) incumbents while also meeting its VRA obligations. Of course, if the Court had imposed similar constraints on partisan gerrymanders as it has on racial gerrymanders — as I argued it should have done in Principled Limitations on Partisan and Racial Redistricting — LA would not be able to defend against a racial gerrymandering claim with the defense that it was engaged in partisan gerrymandering.

Two caveats: at oral argument, some Justices suggested they wanted to re-visit the underlying issue of whether the VRA requires LA to create a second district at all. I’ll be surprised, though, if a majority of the Court decides to re-open that question from the earlier stage of this litigation. Second, if the Court strikes down the current LA district, that will have implications for racial gerrymandering doctrine more generally. How significant or limited those implications might be can’t be said in advance, given the intensely factual mix of race, politics, political geography, and other factors involved in the case.