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(CNN) — The Supreme Court grappled Monday with a years-old, messy legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional districts during an oral argument in which several of the court’s conservatives questioned whether the state had violated the Constitution because of its focus on race.

Several of those justices signaled they are prepared to further weaken the influence the landmark Voting Right Act has on redistricting, although it wasn’t clear if there was a majority to do so in Louisiana’s case. That’s partly because lower courts had guided the state toward redrawing its lines with race in mind.

“We’re in the business of complying with federal court decisions,” said Benjamin Aguiñaga, the state’s solicitor general. “And when they told us that we needed to draw a second majority Black district, that’s what we did.”

The case could have nationwide implications for how much state lawmakers may think about race when drawing congressional districts. And given the GOP’s narrow majority, the high court’s decision could ultimately be a factor that helps decide control of the House of Representatives after the 2026 election.

Louisiana has argued that it was caught between a rock and a hard place. At first, a federal court ruled that the state had likely violated the Voting Rights Act by drawing only one majority Black district out of six. When the state sought to comply with that decision by drawing a second majority Black district, a group of self-described “non-African American voters” sued in 2024, alleging the state violated the Constitution by relying too much on race to meet the first court’s demands.

Though the case dealt with vastly different legal and practical concerns, the session at times seemed to echo a battle playing out between the federal judiciary and President Donald Trump’s administration. Even as Trump has vowed to follow adverse court orders, several of his aides have flirted with defying them.

“I’m sort of concerned about your view…that a court order compelling you to do something is not a good reason for you to do it,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a member of the court’s liberal wing, told the attorney for the plaintiffs.

Edward Greim, the attorney representing the “non-African American” voters who challenged the map, stressed that Louisiana was not under a direct court order to draw a new map. The state had other options, including continuing to litigate the case.

Part of what’s at issue in the case for the Supreme Court is whether race “predominated” among its considerations in drawing new districts. State officials have said that politics was more at play than race – and specifically a desire to retain incumbents, including House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The case, Louisiana v. Callais, tees up a series of important questions that deal with race and redistricting. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires that states do not dilute the power of minority voters, a response to decades of post-Civil War efforts – particularly in the South – to limit the political power of African Americans.

And yet the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause demands that a state cannot draw a map based on race.

Because of that inherent tension, the Supreme Court has tended to give some “breathing room” to states in drawing their maps. The central question of the case is exactly how much room state lawmakers should have.

Louisiana officials have suggested that the Supreme Court might want to use the case to take federal courts out of the business of deciding racial gerrymanders altogether, just as it withdrew from fights over political gerrymanders in a 2019 decision. But a group of Black plaintiffs that challenged the state’s original map are, understandably, opposed to that idea because it would severely limit their ability to challenge future discriminatory maps.

The Supreme Court has, in recent years, slowly chipped away at the power of the Voting Rights Act. But in a stunning decision in 2023, the court appeared to bolster a key provision of the VRA by ordering Alabama to redraw its map to allow for an additional Black majority district. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, penned the opinion for a 5-4 majority, siding with the court’s three liberals. Another conservative, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, agreed with the key parts of the holding.

The new district at issue in the case slashes diagonally for some 250 miles from Shreveport in the northwest of the state to Baton Rouge in the southeast to create a district where Black residents make up some 54% of voters – up from about 24% under the old lines.

The “non-African American” voters slammed the district as a “sinuous and jagged second majority Black district” that they told the Supreme Court is “based on racial stereotypes, racially ‘balkanizing’ a 250-mile swath of Louisiana.”

Although Black residents make up roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, the state had just one Black lawmaker in its six-member US House delegation prior to the initial court ruling that led to a second Black-majority district.

Rep. Cleo Fields, a Democrat, won the seat in last year’s election – adding a second Democrat to the state’s delegation. In raw political terms, the Supreme Court’s decision could leave Fields in power – or it could force a redrawing of the maps before the 2026 election.

The Biden administration submitted a brief to the Supreme Court that technically supported neither party but that urged the justices to reverse a special three-judge district court that would throw out the current map. Days after taking office, the Trump administration submitted a letter declaring that it had “reconsidered the government’s position” and that the earlier brief “no longer represents the position of the United States.”

CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Fredreka Schouten contributed to this report.

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