Liam Conner
Washington – The Supreme Court said Wednesday it will allow Louisiana to use for the 2024 elections a congressional map that includes a second district where the majority of voters are black, giving them the opportunity to elect their favorite candidate.
The justices granted two separate requests — one from a group of black voters and civil rights groups and the other second from the state of Louisiana – suspend a ruling by a three-judge federal district court panel that blocked Louisiana from using the newly redrawn map in any future elections.
The district lines were drawn and approved by the GOP-led legislature in January after federal courts rejected an initial congressional map adopted in March 2022 as likely violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The court appeared divided along ideological lines. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said they would deny the stay requests. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson disagreed, writing that she would have left a remedial process before the district court before considering whether emergency intervention was warranted.
The Supreme Court ruling is a victory for Democrats, who are likely to pick up another seat in Louisiana under revamped Congressional lines. It’s also the latest development in a long-running legal battle over the state’s district boundaries that began after the 2020 Census kicked off the redistricting process.
Louisiana Congressional Map
The first map adopted by Republican state legislators in 2022 consisted of five majority-white congressional districts and one majority-black district, even though about a third of the state’s population is black. The Black Voter Caucus and civil rights groups challenged the legality of that plan, arguing that it diluted the voting power of Black residents in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick agreed with the challengers and issued injunction blocking the state from holding any elections within the boundaries drawn for 2022. She then gave state lawmakers the opportunity to draw up a new map that included an additional majority and minority voting district.
As proceedings in the case continued, the Supreme Court decided in favor of black voters which challenged Congressional voting lines in Alabama and upheld a lower court ruling that found the map likely violated Section 2.
Following this decision, the high court opened the way for Louisiana to move forward with redrawing its congressional map as ordered by Dick. A later federal appeals court it gave state legislators until January 15, 2024, to adopt the new redistricting plan that included the majority-black second district.
Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who took office in January, called a special session of the state legislature to set the new voting boundaries, and the map with the two majority-black districts was adopted that month.
Michael Johnson/ AP
Congress’s new redistricting plan aimed to protect certain Republican incumbents, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Rep. Julia Letlow, at the expense of Republican Rep. Garret Graves, according to court documents. Graves, who represents the 6th Congressional District, supported Landry’s Republican opponent in the governor’s race and did not publicly support Scalise’s bid for House speaker last year.
According to the map, the reconfigured District 6, drawn to create the additional majority-minority district, stretches from Shreveport in the northwest corner of Louisiana to Baton Rouge in the southeast. Connects predominantly black populations of Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge.
Shortly after the new map was signed by the governor, a group of 12 voters, who describe themselves as “non-African Americans,” challenged it as a racial gerrymander, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. They claimed the state drew its six electoral districts predominantly based on race and created the two majority-black districts “without regard to any traditional redistricting criteria.”
But those who support the new redistricting plan, including Black voters and civil rights groups involved in challenging the initial 2022 map and Republican officials, argued that lawmakers sought to comply with Section 2 — as required by Dick’s order — at the same time. time they worked to fulfill their political objectives.
Still, the district court’s three-judge panel issued a split decision last month, which blocked the latest GOP-drawn congressional map from being used in any election after deeming it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The two justices in the majority, Justices David Joseph and Robert Summerhays, agreed that race was the predominant factor driving the state’s decision-making in defining the boundaries of the second majority-black district, District 6. They declined to weigh in. whether it is feasible to create a second majority-black district that complies with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, but added that “Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act never requires that race predominate in the formation of voting districts to the detriment of district principles traditional.”
Civil rights groups, black voters and state Republican officials asked the Supreme Court suspend the panel’s decision and allow it to use the new map in the next elections. Although lower court judges set a deadline of early June for redrawing voting lines, the state argued it needed to know by May 15 which map to use in November’s congressional elections.
In their proposal for emergency relief from the justices, voters and civil rights organizations said the panel’s split decision “deprives the Legislature of the flexibility needed to remedy an identified violation of the VRA in accordance with its own policy priorities.” . They said it would be “incongruous” if the purposeful creation of an additional majority-minority district to remedy a Section 2 violation constituted impermissible racial gerrymandering.
“In the district court’s opinion, and contrary to this court’s precedents, once the legislature concluded that it must consider race to comply with the VRA, any other considerations that entered its redistricting calculation were necessarily subordinate to race. for voters and groups said.
In their request for emergency assistance, Louisiana officials lamented that, just days before Secretary of State Nancy Landry needs to begin implementing a congressional map for the 2024 elections, “Louisiana does not have a congressional map.”
“Louisiana’s impossible situation in this redistricting cycle would be comical if it weren’t so serious,” they wrote in their archiving to judges.
Republican state officials have warned that upcoming contests risk being disorganized amid competing court orders pitting Voting Rights Act rulings that called for the adoption of a second majority-black district against the panel’s ruling. April, which concluded that doing so violated the Equal Protection Clause.
“This absurd situation is an affront to Louisiana, its voters and democracy itself. The madness must end,” they wrote.
But the group of 12 voters who challenged the January map accused Louisiana of imposing a “brutal racial gerrymander” on them and millions of other voters and called the redistricting plan adopted earlier this year “morally repugnant.”
“Plain and simple, race was the first criterion considered by the legislature, and it was the criterion that could not be compromised,” they wrote in a archiving to the Supreme Court, citing comments from state legislators about the need to form a second majority-minority district to remedy the likely violation of the Voting Rights Act.
They also accused the state of fabricating the May 15 deadline to implement a congressional map, which lawyers say is not based on a state law, rule or regulation.
“The State is keen to avoid chaos and protect the electoral process. But in fact, allowing SB8 to go into effect despite the district court’s final order ruling that it is unconstitutional would only dismantle confidence in the integrity of the electoral process. process,” wrote lawyers for the 12 voters who challenged the January map.
They said a Supreme Court stay, which would allow newly drawn district lines to be used for upcoming elections, risks electoral confusion and disruption in the 2024 primaries.
