The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in a dispute over whether Louisiana’s legislature impermissibly took race into account when drawing the state’s latest congressional voting map.
The justices’ decision in the dispute could determine how congressional maps are drawn in Louisiana and beyond as courts wrestle with the extent to which states can legally consider race in the process. It is the latest in a series of challenges to the Voting Rights Act to come before the court in recent years.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that a possible tension exists between Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits practices that dilute the voting power of racial minorities, and the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which courts have said requires that maps cannot be based on race unless they are narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest.
The justices have traditionally given states some leeway in navigating the two to create their maps.
But the Louisiana dispute will test how courts should view maps when these principles bump up against each other.
The results of the dispute, which could shift the boundaries of majority-Black districts in the state, could also help determine the balance of power in the House of Representatives in the coming years, at a time when political control of the chamber has frequently rested on thin margins.
At the heart of the arguments on Monday in two consolidated cases — Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24-109 and Robinson v. Callais, No. 24-110 — is a map adopted by Louisiana’s Legislature in 2024 that for the first time included two congressional districts in which Black voters were a majority.
Louisiana used the map to hold elections in 2024, and voters elected the Democrat Cleo Fields, who is Black, the first time in a decade that Democrats have held two congressional seats in the state.
A group of non-Black voters will argue that the Legislature impermissibly considered race in drawing the district lines, creating “a sinuous and jagged second majority-Black district based on racial stereotypes, racially ‘Balkanizing’ a 250-mile swath of Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s state officials have countered that the non-Black voters cannot show they have been directly injured and that Supreme Court precedent requires the state to consider race when it draws voter maps. In court filings, officials in the Republican-led state expressed frustration with what they called an “impossible” case, arguing that they had followed the letter of the law in the Voting Rights Act, while at the same time denouncing the act’s requirements for states.
“Nobody truly wins in this ‘sordid business’ of ‘divvying us up by race,’” state officials wrote in a brief, referring to language from a 2006 concurrence by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. They added that if Louisiana lost the case, it would “underscore the injustice of forcing states to run an endless ‘legal obstacle course’” to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general under President Barack Obama who now is the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, called the case the “latest attempt to weaken the Voting Rights Act” and strongly disputed the idea that the law was too onerous or no longer necessary.
“When people ask that question of how long should these protection last, well, the answer is that as long as they’re needed,” Mr. Holder said. “Those issues still are there.”
The cases began after the 2020 census showed that the state’s Black population had grown significantly and now makes up one-third of the state. At the time, only one of the state’s six congressional districts had a majority of Black residents.
Despite the demographic changes, in March 2022, lawmakers adopted a redistricting plan that again included only one district where Black voters would constitute a majority, looping together New Orleans and parts of Baton Rouge.
The Louisiana State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and several individual voters sued, arguing that Louisiana’s map diluted the power of Black voters by packing many of them into one district and splintering others into the state’s five remaining districts. They claimed that the Voting Rights Act required the state to add a second majority-minority district.
In June 2022, a federal trial judge temporarily paused Louisiana from using that map in upcoming elections. The judge found that Black voters in Louisiana often supported the same candidate but were consistently outvoted by white bloc voting.
The court gave lawmakers two weeks to draw a new map. Louisiana asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, but the justices decided to pause the case while they considered a similar case, a challenge to Alabama’s voting map.
In that case, Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama had diluted the power of Black voters with its map, upholding the Voting Rights Act. The ruling surprised many experts because the court had been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act for years. The decision was written by Chief Justice Roberts, who has frequently voted to restrict voting rights. The justices then sent Louisiana’s case back to the lower courts for consideration with their new ruling in mind.
In January 2024, the Louisiana lawmakers adopted a new map, this time with two majority-Black districts. But one district snaked more than 200 miles in a narrow, winding diagonal across the state, linking communities in Baton Rouge, the state’s capital, in the southeastern part of the state, with Shreveport, in the state’s northwest.
Shortly after, a group of non-Black Louisiana voters challenged it, saying the new map was an illegal racial gerrymander that violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. In April 2024, a divided three-judge panel agreed, finding that lawmakers improperly prioritized race.
In May, a divided Supreme Court paused the lower court decision, temporarily reinstating the congressional map that included the second majority-Black district, allowing it to be used in the November 2024 election. Now the court will consider how Louisiana should proceed.
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