2 LOUISIANA v. CALLAIS Opinion of the Court violated the Equal Protection Clause, and the State appealed to this Court. The parties originally briefed and argued this suit last Term, and their arguments at that time highlighted problems in the existing body of §2 case law. One problem resulted from the rule that in racial gerrymandering cases, unlike other cases involving claims of racial discrimination, see, e.g., Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U. S. 252, 265–266 (1977), strict scrutiny is triggered only if race “predominated” in the State’s decisionmaking process. In this suit, Louisiana adopted the challenged map and created the second majority-black district because it quite reasonably anticipated that, if it did not do so, the Middle District of Louisiana would order the use of a map with a differently configured second majorityblack district that would effectively oust an incumbent whom the legislature sought to protect. Under our existing case law, that situation posed the question whether race or politics was the State’s “predominant” motivation. Another problem stemmed from the long-unresolved question whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act provides a compelling reason that may justify the intentional use of race in drawing legislative districts. For over 30 years, we have assumed for the sake of argument that the answer is yes. See infra, at 9–11. And we have gone further and assumed that it is enough if a State “ ‘ha[s] a strong basis in evidence’ ” for thinking that the Voting Rights Act requires race-based conduct. Cooper v. Harris, 581 U. S. 285, 292–293 (2017). But allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. These and other problems convinced us that the time had come to resolve whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting. We now answer that question: Compliance with