After rejecting Louisiana’s request that it invalidate a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act in a state-level redistricting lawsuit, a federal appeals court is considering whether it should pause its ruling.
In an Aug. 14 ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed a federal district court’s decision that the Louisiana State Legislature-ordered redrawing of Louisiana’s legislative districts violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The case is known as Nairne v. Landry. On Aug. 15, the state asked the circuit court to put the ruling on hold.
Section 2 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a large language minority group. Courts have interpreted the section to forbid race-based gerrymandering. Gerrymandering refers to the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to benefit a particular party or constituency.
In a separate case, Alabama had asked the Supreme Court in Allen v. Milligan to weaken Section 2. The high court declined to do so in a June 2023 ruling.
On Aug. 15, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill asked the Fifth Circuit to put the Aug. 14 decision on hold until the Supreme Court decides Louisiana v. Callais, an appeal about the use of race in the congressional redistricting process in Louisiana. The high court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case on Oct. 15.
Murrill’s brief argues that the Fifth Circuit should pause its ruling because the Supreme Court has indicated that there may be a “potentially significant change” in how the courts interpret Section 2 and the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Because the high court’s eventual ruling in Louisiana v. Callais “may moot or at least directly impact the Section 2 issues in this case,” the Fifth Circuit should wait for its ruling, the brief states.
It is unclear when the Fifth Circuit will rule on the request.
The case goes back to 2022, when the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted two laws redrawing the boundaries of state House and Senate districts.
Individual voters and the Louisiana branch of the NAACP sued, arguing that the laws violated Section 2 by diluting the voting strength of black voters.
A federal district judge ruled in February 2024 that the laws ran afoul of Section 2 by “packing” black voters in a small quantity of majority-black districts and “cracking” majority-black districts across various black communities. These actions deprived the black voters “of the opportunity to form effective voting blocs,” the Fifth Circuit’s ruling states.
The circuit court affirmed the district court decision, finding that the voters and the NAACP proved that the state violated Section 2.
The electoral maps covered by the state laws being challenged “do not contain a proportional number of majority-minority districts to the percentage of Black voting-age people in Louisiana,” the court wrote.
The Fifth Circuit also rejected Louisiana’s challenge to the constitutionality of Section 2.
“[The challenge] is foreclosed by decades of binding precedent affirming Congress’s broad enforcement authority under the Fifteenth Amendment,” the ruling states.
That amendment guarantees that U.S. citizens’ right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged … on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and gives Congress authority “to enforce” the amendment “by appropriate legislation,” the ruling states.
“[The Voting Rights Act] is a direct exercise of that enforcement authority,” it reads.
On Aug. 19, the voters and the NAACP told the Fifth Circuit that putting the decision on hold “would be severely prejudicial” to their interests, without harming the interests of the state.
The state has not provided reasons to justify delaying the ruling, which would implement changes to the legislative maps before the state’s next legislative elections in 2027, the brief states.
In the upcoming Supreme Court case of Louisiana v. Callais, the justices will look at a federal district judge’s ruling that a previous version of Louisiana’s congressional map discriminated against black voters because it provided for only one black-majority congressional district, even though black people make up almost one-third of the state’s population. The judge ordered the state to create a second black-majority district.
A group of non-black voters sued, arguing that the map with two black-majority districts discriminated against non-minorities by engaging “in explicit, racial segregation of voters.”
On Aug. 1, the Supreme Court directed attorneys in the case to address whether the state Legislature’s decision to create “a second majority-minority congressional district violates the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment forbids the federal government and the states from interfering with voting rights based on a citizen’s race.
After the district court-ordered changes, Republicans won four of the state’s six U.S. House districts in the 2024 elections, and Democrats won two. Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.) won the election in the newly drawn black-majority district, an elongated district that stretches from Shreveport in the northwest, following the Mississippi and Red rivers, to the state capital of Baton Rouge. In the 2022 elections, Republicans won five seats compared with the Democrats’ single seat.
Currently, there are 73 Republicans and 32 Democrats in the state House. In the state Senate, there are 28 Republicans and 11 Democrats, according to Ballotpedia.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Aug. 19, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Aug. 20, 2025.