Effort to block the second majority-black district in Louisiana comes to the Supreme Court

Case example

By 2022, the Louisiana legislation adopted a congress card that included only a majority-black district among the six awarded to the state, although a third of the state’s population is black. The card was contested by the federal court as a dilution of the votes from black residents, and by 2024 the legislation withdrew another map, this time with two majority-black districts.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will take the latest phase in the battle for Louisiana’s congress card. Defending the card claims the state that it was effectively caught between a cliff and a hard place as it tried to comply with both the federal law of voting rights and the constitution. But the voters who challenged the new card counter that Louisiana never intended to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and they urge the judges to rule that the new card was a constitutional racial gerrymander – that is, the sorted voters who were primarily based on their race.

The federal court, which threw the 2022 card, judged that it is likely to violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prevents electoral practice that results in a denial or abbreviation of the right to vote based on race. The court blocked the state to use the card for congressional elections, and it ordered the state to draw a new plan that would include another majority-black district.

The US Appeals Court for the 5th Circuit maintained the Court of Justice’s conclusions and ordered the state to adopt a new card by January 15, 2024. If the state did not do so at that time, the appeal court would hold a lawsuit and, if necessary, adopt a card for the 2024 election.

The Louisiana legislation went back to the drawing board and adopted a new card, known as SB 8. It created another majority-black district that begins in the northwest corner of the state near Shreveport and extends 250 miles southeast towards Baton Rouge.

It asked another challenge, this time from a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American.” They filed a new trial that argued that SB 8 was a constitutional racial gerrymander. A federal court in three judge agreed with them and banned the state from using it in future elections.

In May 2024, a shared Supreme Court’s decision was paused and cleared the way for the state to use SB 8 in the election in 2024. Cleo Fields, a State Senator who had represented a Majority Sort District in Congress for two election periods in the 1990s, until he was forced out of Redistricting,

The state and voters, who had challenged the 2022 card, appealed to the Supreme Court in July, and the judges in November put the case for oral argument.

In his Brief by the Supreme Court, Louisiana claims that “the division of Americans by race is a spot on our country’s history” that “should be a dishonest relic from the past.” But the Supreme Court’s voting rights, it claims, forces the states “to continue the weak practice today – states both when they consider race too little and when they consider race too much.”

But the Supreme Court, says Louisiana, should not even reach the case in the case. Instead, it must be stated that the “non-African American voters” do not have a legal right to sue, known as standing, to bring their lawsuits which claim that the map 2024 card sorts black voters by race. These voters, it emphasize, presented no evidence during the trial to show how they were injured by the creation of another majority-black district.

If the court reaches the benefits, Louisiana continues, it must make it clear that states have the “respiratory room” “between the competing requirements of the” voting law and the constitution’s equal protection clause that prevents the government from treating people differently for no reason.

The challengers in this case did not show that race was the primary factor behind the legislator’s decision, Louisiana maintains. Instead, to the extent that it focused on race, it only did it because the court would have created another majority-black district if the state did not. And with another majority-black district that is inevitable, the state explains, the Redistricting process was “a rescue operation” in which the legislature tried to “best protect his most important established companies”, the house’s speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, both Republicans. But even if race had been the motivational factor, the state adds, the legislature had good reason to believe it had to draw the second majority-black district to comply with VA.

But “the most important step,” the Supreme Court must take in this case, concludes Louisiana, is to “provide clear guidance on how states will navigate this notorious unclear area of ​​the law” so that it can “put an end to the extraordinary waste of time and resources that plague states after each redistrict cycle.”

The original group of challengers to the map with only a majority-black district joins the state of defending the new map. They claim that if the state claims (as it does) that politics rather than race was the essence of its redistricting decisions, then the “non-African American” voters in this case “separate race from politics” and meeting “high bar” by showing that “race for his own sake” was the primary factor in the legislation to adopt SB 8. That the legislature pulled this card to protect Johnson and Letlow’s seats, “preserve the representation of North Louisiana, and join society with common interests along the Red River.”

At least, the 2022 extensions suggest that the court should send the case back to the three Judge District Court because this court should not have considered the “non-African US” voters’ request to temporarily block the 2024 card and the benefits of their claim at the same time on an “extraordinarily accelerated” plan that did not give one-sole judge who challenges a sufficient opportunity to prepare their case.

The challenges of the card with two majority-black districts call on the judges to leave the three-judge court’s decision in place. This decision they write was correct when it found that the “totally impossible” the race and a desire to protect Republican established, played an equal role in the legislature’s decision to draw SB 8. Reality, they say, is that the legislation “first made the decision ‘to impose racial quota, elimination of a Republican seat, and’ only ‘had to’ take chosen to choose to choose the republic. If Louisiana’s true motive was to comply with VA, they continue, “that intention alone is proof that race” was the primary motivating factor in drawing the second majority-black district.

The “non-African American” challengers push back against the state’s proposal that they lack the status of bringing their trial. Several of them they notice, live in the district that they are challenging, which is all the law requires.

They also insist that the original challengers cannot now contest the procedures used by the three Judge District Court. The challengers of 2022 were not injured by the timeline because their lawyers already had experience with redistricting cases in Louisiana, they emphasize.

In a “friend of the Court” that supports the group of non-black voters, Alabama (along with 13 other states) complains of a “court-driven expansion of VA”, arguing that it “departs from the protection series introduced by Congress in 1982.”

Alabama suggests that the court has two options to remedy this expansion. First, it could adopt a narrow reading indicating that members of a minority group can participate in the political process, and therefore states do not violate section 2 as long as they can register to vote, vote, “choose the political party” they wish to support and “participate in its affairs.” Alternatively, it constitutes that the court could go ahead and maintain that the use of section 2 to redistricting plans is in itself constitutional.

District of Columbia, along with another group of 19 states, counts that the judges should not even consider the questions that Alabama raises because they are not before the Louisiana’s appeal. But if it is considering these questions, DC continues, the court must “reject them. The court is decided” Law that interprets section 2, explains DC, “is useful and has been used by states for decades.”

Unlike many high-profile redistricting cases, the federal government will not participate in Monday’s oral arguments. In December, the Biden administration filed a brief in which it (among other things claimed) that Louisiana had good reason to believe that it was necessary to pull another majority-black district to comply with VA, and it tried to appear as a “court friend” to claim this attitude.

But on January 24, acting lawyer Sarah Harris informed the judges that the Trump administration did not stand by her predecessor’s attitude and the government no longer wanted to participate in the oral arguments.

This article was originally published on Howe on the field.