The Supreme Court sent a rather unfortunate message during Monday’s argument in a racial gerrymandering dispute called Louisiana v. Callais: Do not trust us.

To understand where that message is coming from, it’s helpful to be familiar with a case the Court decided just two years ago that is nearly identical to Callais. In Allen v. Milligan (2023), the Court ruled that Alabama’s congressional maps violated the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial gerrymandering, and that the state must draw an additional district with a Black majority to ensure Black citizens’ political power in the state wasn’t illegally diluted.

Now the Callais case places Louisiana in the same shoes Alabama wore in Milligan. Louisiana’s own lawyers concede that Callais “presents the same question” as Millligan.

If the Supreme Court were the sort of institution that applies its own precedents in a consistent and predictable way, the outcome in Callais would be obvious. Since the Court recently decided a virtually identical case ordering the state of Alabama to draw a second Black-majority district, Louisiana should also be required to draw a second such district.

Indeed, Louisiana appears to agree. After a legal battle, it eventually had its legislature draw new maps with two Black-majority districts.

Nevertheless, at Monday’s argument in Callais, all six of the Court’s Republicans suggested the Court does not care about its recent precedent: They all appeared to be looking for a way to strike down these new maps. Four of those justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett — dissented in Milligan, so their questions aren’t really surprising. But Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both of whom joined the Milligan majority, also seemed highly skeptical of Louisiana’s new maps.

Monday’s argument did create some uncertainty about whether Kavanaugh will block Louisiana’s new maps in this case — or whether he will wait until a different pending case reaches the Court before attempting a ruling that would blow up nearly four decades worth of voting rights law.

Kavanaugh has made it clear he’s not entirely sure that much of the Voting Rights Act is still necessary. In the Milligan case, Kavanaugh wrote a separate concurring opinion arguing that the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial........

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