Supreme Court hears appeal to block second district with majority Black in Louisiana
CASE PREVIEW
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Louisiana v. Callais. (Amy Lutz via Shutterstock)
In 2022, the Louisiana legislature adopted a congressional map that included only one majority-Black district among the six allotted to the state, though a third of the state’s population is Black. The map was challenged by Black residents in federal court and in 2024, the legislature drew a new map with two majority-Black district. The state argues that it was caught between a stone and a brick as it tried adhering to both the federal Voting Right Act and the Constitution. The federal district court that threw the 2022 map out ruled that it violated Section 2 (which bars election practices which result in a denial of or abridgement to the right to vote on the basis of race). The court ordered that the state not use the map in congressional elections and to draw a plan with a majority-Black district. If the state did not do so by then, the court of appeals indicated, then the district court would hold a trial and, if needed, adopt a map for the 2024 elections.
The Louisiana legislature went back to the drawing board and enacted a new map, known as S.B. 8. This created a second district with a majority of Black voters that began in the northwest corner near Shreveport, and stretched 250 miles south to Baton Rouge. The state was prohibited from using S.B. 8 in future elections by a three-judge federal district court. A federal district court of three judges agreed with them, and prohibited the state from utilizing it in future election.
In may 2024, the Supreme Court, divided, halted the district court’s decision, clearing up the way for the State to use S.B. Cleo Fields, a state senator who had represented a majority-Black district in Congress for two terms during the 1990s until he was forced out by redistricting, was elected to represent the newly drawn district. Louisiana argues in its brief to the Supreme Court that the “divvying of Americans by race” is a “stain on our nation’s history,” that “should be disgraced as a relic of yesterday.” But, it says, the Supreme Court’s cases on voting rights compel the states to “continue that vile tradition today — penalizing States when they consider racial issues too little or too much.” The Supreme Court should rule that “non-African American” voters do not have standing to sue to bring their lawsuit alleging the 2024 map unconstitutionally sorts Black voters by race. Louisiana argues that if the court decides to reach the merits of the case, it will make it clear that states are allowed “breathing space” between the competing demands of the Voting Rights Act, and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, which prohibits the government from treating individuals differently without good cause. Louisiana argues that the only reason it focused on race was because the district court could have created a majority-Black district without the state. The state adds that even if race had been the motivating factor, the legislature had good reason to believe it was necessary to draw the second majority-Black districts in order for the VRA. Louisiana says that “the most important thing” the Supreme Court can do in this case is to provide clear guidance on how States should navigate this notoriously vague area of law. This will “put an immediate end to the extraordinary loss of time and resources” that plagues States after each redistricting process. The original group of challengers to the map with only one majority-Black district joins the state in defending the new map. 8. The challengers to a map with two majority Black districts ask the justices not to overturn the decision of the three judge district court. The challengers to the map with two majority-Black districts urge the justices to leave the three-judge district court’s decision in place. 8. They note that several of them live in the district that they are challenging, which is all that the law requires. Several of them, they note, live in the district that they are challenging, which is all that the law requires.
They also insist that the original challengers cannot now contest the procedures that the three-judge district court used. The 2022 challengers were not harmed by the timeline because their lawyers already had experience on redistricting litigation in Louisiana, they emphasize.
In a “friend of the court” brief supporting the group of non-Black voters, Alabama (joined by 13 other states) complains about a “judicially driven expansion of the VRA,” arguing that it “departs from the guardrails imposed by Congress in 1982.”
Alabama suggests that the court has two options to remedy this expansion. First, it could adopt a narrow reading indicating that members of a minority group can participate in the political process, and therefore states do not violate Section 2, as long as they can register to vote, vote, “choose the political party” they want to support, and “participate in its affairs.” Alternatively, it posits, the court could go further and hold that the application of Section 2 to redistricting plans is itself unconstitutional.
The District of Columbia, joined by a different group of 19 states, counters that the justices should not even consider the issues that Alabama raises, because they are not before the court in Louisiana’s appeal. D.C. says that if the court does decide to consider these issues, it should reject them. The Court’s settled” law interpreting Section 2, D.C. explains, “is workable and has been used by States for decades.”
Unlike many high-profile redistricting cases, the federal government will not be participating in Monday’s oral arguments. In December, the Biden administration filed a brief in which it contended (among other things) that Louisiana had good reason to believe that it needed to draw a second majority-Black district to comply with the VRA, and it sought to appear as a “friend of the court” to argue that position.
But on Jan. 24, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris notified the justices that the Trump administration did not stand by her predecessor’s position, and the government no longer wanted to participate in the oral arguments.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
