Six Supreme Court justices, both liberal and conservative, did not immediately buy the case made by the state of Alabama that the court should overturn 40 years of precedent and gut the Voting Rights Act during arguments in the case of Merrill v. Milligan on Tuesday.

In questioning Alabamas argument, it appeared possible that the courts conservatives may stop short of explicitly gutting the Voting Rights Act, as Alabama requested in its brief but instead effectively gut it by making it even harder to prove that a racial minority constitutes a geographically compact community.

The case hinges on whether or not states must take race into limited consideration to determine if their legislative district maps are allowed under the Voting Rights Act.

The court heard the case after Black Alabamians, representing 27% of the state population, sued the state after Republicans drew a congressional district map with only one Black majority seat out of seven. They argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act demanded that Alabama draw a second Black majority seat in the historic Black Belt, named for its fertile soil and home to the descendants of enslaved people who worked the regions plantations.

A district court panel, including two judges appointed by former President Donald Trump and one by Bill Clinton, ruled that the state must draw a new map with a second Black majority seat for the 2022 elections. The lawsuit was substantially likely to succeed on the merits of their Section Two claims and was not, the court said, a close one.

This was because the challenge satisfied each prong of the existing test approved by the Supreme Court to determine if a new majority-minority seat is required to be drawn under Section 2. In 1986, the court approved this test in its decision in Thornburg v. Gingles.

The Gingles test requires Section 2 plaintiffs to prove that the minority population must be sufficiently large enough and reside in a geographically compact region. Second, that minority population must be politically cohesive, as they must vote together as a bloc. And third, the majority and minority populations are politically polarized in a manner where the majority population, in this case, whites, also votes cohesively as a bloc that would always defeat the minoritys preferred candidate.