The Supreme Court dealt Republicans in Louisiana a major blow Monday in a key congressional redistricting case.

The high court lifted its hold on and dismissed a challenge to a lower court order directing the Pelican State to add a majority-black district to its congressional map, increasing the likelihood Democrats pick up a House seat in the 2024 elections.

Monday’s order came two-and-a-half weeks after the court found that Alabama’s district lines, drawn following the 2020 Census, likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act.

One-third of Louisiana’s population is African-American, but only one of its six congressional districts is majority-black — the 2nd Congressional District, which has a 62% black population and is repped by Democrat Troy Carter.

Louisiana Republicans pushed the current map through by overriding a veto from term-limited Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who claimed the apportionment diluted the voting power of black residents.

Last year, a federal judge ordered the state to redraw its map and add a second black majority district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a new map in 2022, leaving the courts poised to take over the process.

The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals was gearing up to review the lower court order when the Supreme Court intervened in June of 2022, putting a halt to the process until after the midterm elections.

Louisiana’s congressional map is similar to one enacted after the 2010 Census that was allowed to stand. That map also featured five Republican districts and a single Democratic district, according to FiveThirtyEight.

A redrawn congressional map could pose a major problem for one of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) key allies, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who was instrumental in debt ceiling negotiations with the White House. The Cook Political Report has rated his district, which includes much of Baton Rouge and its suburbs, as a “toss-up” heading into 2024.

In the Alabama case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s 5-4 majority that a voting district “is not equally open … when minority voters face — unlike their majority peers — bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.”

The high court also found that Alabama’s map “likely” met the three conditions to prove a violation of the law: the minority group was “sufficiently large and [geographically] compact,” “politically cohesive,” and the white majority “votes as a bloc to sufficiently … defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.”

According to the Census Bureau, 27% of Alabama’s population is African-American, but just one of the state’s seven House districts was majority black.