Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday ordered further arguments over Louisiana’s congressional map that was approved by the state’s GOP-led legislature and created a second majority-Black district.
An order from the court issued on the last day of its term restored the case to its calendar for reargument, with an additional scheduling order to come. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the move to order more arguments and said the court should have decided the case.
The move means the state’s map with two majority-Black districts remains intact for now.
The district lines at the center of the dispute were invalidated in 2022 by a three-judge lower court panel, which sided with a group of self-described “non-African-American voters” who had challenged the House map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The map wasn’t the first crafted by the state’s Republican-led legislature in the wake of the 2020 Census. Instead, Louisiana’s efforts to redraw district lines, as all states do after the census, have resulted in a yearslong legal battle that has been before the Supreme Court twice before.
The case demonstrated the challenges state lawmakers face when trying to balance complying with the Voting Rights Act without relying too much on race during the drawing the political lines, which can run afoul of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court’s decision is also likely to have implications for the balance of power in the House in the 2026 midterm elections, when Republicans will try to hold onto their razor-thin majority.
The legal wrangling over Louisiana’s congressional map has spanned several years and began after the state legislature redrew the six House districts in early 2022. A federal judge in Baton Rouge ruled that year that the map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it diluted Black voting strength, and ordered the state to put a remedial plan in place that had two majority-Black congressional districts.
That initial map had one majority-Black district and five majority-White districts, even though African Americans make up nearly one-third of Louisiana’s population.
The new map adopted by the state legislature reconfigured Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District to bring the map into compliance with the Voting Rights Act, state lawmakers said. But they said they also had a second goal: to protect powerful Republican incumbents in the House, namely Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Rep. Julia Letlow. Letlow is the only woman in the state’s congressional delegation and sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee, state officials noted.
The new District 6 has a Black voting-age population of roughly 51% and stretches from Shreveport, in Louisiana’s northwest corner, to Baton Rouge in the southeast, connecting predominantly Black communities along the way.
But after the new voting lines were adopted, 12 “non-African-American voters” sued the state and alleged the reconfigured District 6 was a racial gerrymander that violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
A divided three-judge district court panel sitting in Shreveport agreed and said the legislature relied too much on race when it drew the new House district lines. Louisiana Republicans joined with Black voters and voting rights groups — who were on opposing sides in the challenge to the original map — to ask the Supreme Court to let the state use the new congressional map for the 2024 elections.
The high court granted their request for emergency relief, and in November, Louisiana voters sent two Black Democrats to Congress. The Supreme Court then agreed to take up the case.
The redistricting dispute is one of several the high court has been confronted with in recent years, and more continue to make their way to the justices. In a landmark 2013 ruling, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement, which required certain states and localities with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices to receive Justice Department approval before changing their election rules.
Then, in 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts do not have a role to play in deciding legal fights over partisan gerrymandering, when state’s voting lines are drawn to entrench the political party in power.
But in an unexpected ruling in 2023, the Supreme Court declined an invitation to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Instead, the high court invalidated Alabama’s congressional map crafted after the 2020 Census, which ultimately led to the election of the state’s second Black House member.
Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.
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