Redistricting based on race is unconstitutional, Louisiana’s attorney general told the Supreme Court on Aug. 27 in a preview of arguments that the state will make in an important upcoming election law case.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said her state has long argued that the Supreme Court’s “redistricting jurisprudence needs to be drastically changed or overruled.”
“By requiring state legislatures to draw maps that sort voters by race, it forces us to violate the federal Constitution,” she told The Epoch Times.
Murrill’s comments come as the nation’s highest court prepares to rehear Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais on Oct. 15. The court already heard the consolidated cases on March 24 but declined to issue a ruling.
Arguments in March focused on whether a version of Louisiana’s congressional map violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act. Section 2 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate based on race, color, or membership in a large language minority group such as American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Native, or American Hispanic.
Courts have held that in certain circumstances, the Voting Rights Act permits states to take race into account when drawing electoral boundaries, but maps drawn explicitly based on race are unconstitutional.
On Aug. 1, the Supreme Court directed the litigants to present arguments about whether the court-ordered creation of a second black-majority congressional district in Louisiana is constitutional.
A federal district judge previously ruled that an earlier version of the map, which included one black-majority congressional district, discriminated against black voters, who constitute nearly one-third of the state’s population. The judge ordered the state to create a second black-majority district after finding that its failure to do so likely violated Section 2.
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.”
The Supreme Court voted in May 2024 to require Louisiana to use the disputed congressional map that created the second black-majority district in that year’s elections. Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry said in an application that not moving forward with the map so close to the 2024 elections would cause “chaos.”
When federal courts required the state to draw a new majority-minority congressional district, the state “did so under protest,” defending the action because the high court’s “backwards precedents” permitted it, Murrill told The Epoch Times.
According to her, that system is unconstitutional. The Constitution does not see black or white voters, she said; rather, “it sees only American voters.”
Murrill’s office filed a new brief on Aug. 27 in anticipation of the high court rehearing Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais on Oct. 15.
“[Racial classifications] are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” the brief states, quoting a 1993 precedent.
And racial classifications related to the right to vote “are uniquely odious” because they “harm voters of all races whose skin colors determine their voting districts,” the brief reads.
According to the brief, such classifications harm states, which end up being sued “for considering race too much or too little”; the federal judiciary, which “must pick winners and losers based on race”; and the United States’ “stature as a Nation.”
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of Section 2 in its landmark 1986 ruling in Thornburg v. Gingles “is itself unconstitutional,” even though the court has tried to make Gingles “workable, coherent, predictable, and constitutional,” the brief states.
Also on Aug. 27, voter Press Robinson filed a brief in support of the district court ruling that required the creation of the second black-majority congressional district.
The state’s decision to create the electoral map complied with several court orders, according to the brief, and was consistent with the 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment’s guarantee of equal voting rights and the provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Even if the Supreme Court finds that the state relied on race excessively in drawing the map, it should send the case back to a lower court for reconsideration. The high court should require the state to generate a map “in which Black voters are not foreclosed by racial bloc voting from electing the candidates of their choice,” the brief states.
The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling in the case could force lawmakers nationwide in the future to scale back the use of race in the redistricting process.
The outcome of the Supreme Court case could also affect the balance of power in the federal legislative branch.
Currently, Republicans maintain a thin majority over Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The second black-majority seat in dispute in Louisiana is currently held by Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.). The redrawn, elongated district stretches from Shreveport in the northwest to the state capital of Baton Rouge, following the Mississippi and Red rivers.
Republicans won five U.S. House districts and Democrats won one in the 2022 elections.
After the court-ordered map was adopted, Republicans won four of the state’s six U.S. House districts and Democrats won two in the 2024 elections.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Aug. 27, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Aug. 28, 2025.