The state of Louisiana and a bloc of black voters asked the Supreme Court on July 30 to uphold an election map that created a second black-majority congressional district in Louisiana.
The new legal filings came after the Supreme Court voted 6–3 to issue an emergency order in May that for the time being directed Louisiana to use the map in upcoming elections.
Louisiana previously argued in court papers that abandoning the map months before this year’s elections would cause “chaos.”
In the order two months ago, the nation’s highest court left open the question of whether it would reverse a lower court order that overturned the map.
The Supreme Court’s eventual decision in the case will have nationwide political ramifications given the Republicans’ wafer-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Louisiana is home to House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans.
Louisiana currently has six electoral districts in the U.S. House. Five of those six seats are now held by Republicans. The GOP also occupies both U.S. Senate seats
The map in dispute was drawn up by the Republican-controlled Louisiana Legislature under a June 2022 order from Judge Shelly Dick of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. She made a preliminary finding that the original map, which provided for one black-majority congressional district in the state, likely discriminated against black voters who comprise nearly one-third of the state’s population.
The judge ordered the Legislature to create a second black-majority district to comply with Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act. Section 2 forbids voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a large language minority group.
In November 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit got involved, imposing a Jan. 15, 2024, deadline on the Legislature to produce the required map.
The Legislature met the deadline and approved a map that included the two black-majority districts.
The new court filings followed the Supreme Court’s May 15 order that blocked an April 30 ruling by a divided three-member panel of federal judges in the Western District of Louisiana.
The panel determined that the map couldn’t be used in upcoming elections because it unconstitutionally disfavored non-black voters. The panel said in its order, which was put on hold by the Supreme Court, that a new map would have to be drawn by June 3.
The lead applicant in one of the two cases at hand, Press Robinson, a black man and registered voter, filed a jurisdictional statement with the Supreme Court on July 30, asking it to hear the case known as Robinson v. Callais. Among the co-applicants are other voters and the Louisiana State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Robinson said in the document that failing to reverse the panel’s ruling would limit state legislatures’ options when attempting to comply with federal law.
The decision “will further inject the federal courts into the redistricting process and deprive states of the necessary flexibility to take account of other legislative priorities when they act to remedy identified violations of [Section] 2 [of the Voting Rights Act],” the document stated.
The respondents, who oppose the map, are non-black voters led by voter Phillip Callais.
Callais said in previously filed court papers that the map featuring two black-majority districts unlawfully discriminated against non-black voters.
The map “engaged in explicit, racial segregation of voters,” he said.
Louisiana also filed a jurisdictional statement with the Supreme Court on July 30 in the parallel case of Landry v. Callais. Applicant Nancy Landry is Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state.
Redistricting is supposed to be done by legislatures, not by the courts, the state argued in its filing.
The panel here failed to “exercise extraordinary caution” in adjudicating the claim that the state drew the lines of electoral districts on a racial basis, and its judgment should be reversed, the document said.
The statement didn’t appear in the Supreme Court’s docket at the time of publication, but Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga confirmed it was filed with the court and emailed The Epoch Times a copy of the document.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the state is doing its best to follow the law.
“The Federal Courts have placed Louisiana in an impossible situation,” she told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
“A district court and the Fifth Circuit told us that we would violate the Voting Rights Act if we did not create a second majority-black district. But a separate district court in this case told us that we violated the Constitution by doing so.
“This situation is an affront to the State, its voters, the judiciary, and democracy itself. We look forward to defending our map in the Supreme Court,” she said.
Callais’s attorney, Edward Greim of Graves Garrett in Kansas City, Missouri, didn’t respond by publication time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
It’s unclear when the Supreme Court will act on the new court filings.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared July 31, 2024, in The Epoch Times.
Photo: Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry, a Republican