16 LOUISIANA v. CALLAIS Opinion of the Court bottom two maps). This district connects largely urban black communities in Baton Rouge and Lafayette with more rural black communities in the northeast corner of the State. By contrast, SB8’s District 6 connects the Baton Rouge and Lafayette black populations with the distant black population in Shreveport, in the northwest. Louisiana adopted this scheme, rather than the one used in the Robinson illustrative maps, because it protects the Republican incumbents the State considered most important: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Appropriations Committee member Julia Letlow. See Brief for Appellant in No. 24–109, pp. 13–14, 17. Not long after SB8 was enacted, another lawsuit was filed, this time in the Western District of Louisiana. A group of plaintiffs (the Callais plaintiffs) asserted that SB8, and specifically District 6, was a racial gerrymander that violated the Equal Protection Clause. The plaintiffs from Robinson intervened in the litigation, seeking to defend Louisiana’s decision to draw a second majority-minority district. Because the Callais plaintiffs challenged “the constitutionality of the apportionment of congressional districts,” a District Court of three judges was convened to hear the suit. 28 U. S. C. §2284(a). The court held a 3-day preliminary injunction hearing, which was consolidated with a trial on the merits. Observing that SB8’s “second majority-minority district . . . stretches some 250 miles from Shreveport in the northwest corner of the state to Baton Rouge in southeast Louisiana, slicing through metropolitan areas to scoop up pockets of predominantly Black populations from Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge,” the court concluded that the map effected a racial gerrymander that “violates the Equal Protection Clause.” Callais v. Landry, 732 F. Supp. 3d 574, 582, 588 (WD La. 2024). Judge Stewart of the Fifth Circuit dissented. See id., at 614. The State of