Louisiana, non-Black voters ask Supreme Court to overturn state’s congressional map

Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry asked the Supreme Court this week to strike down the state’s congressional map that carves out two majority-Black districts, saying the focus on race runs afoul of the Constitution.

Ms. Landry joins with the state’s governor, attorney general and a group of non-Black voters in asking the justices to overturn the map and give the state more leeway to draw maps without focusing on promoting racial minorities.

The case is shaping up as one of several blockbusters early on the high court’s calendar when its new term starts next month.

Louisiana’s map has been the subject of years of court battles, after the state, whose population is 33% Black, initially created just one of its six districts to emphasize Black voters.

A federal court said that violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act because it didn’t maximize minorities’ voting power. The court ordered a redraw, forcing the state to come up with a map that had two majority-Black districts.

Non-Black voters challenged the new map as being too focused on race.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill initially had defended the state’s map all the way to the Supreme Court, which heard the case last term.

But the justices declined to issue a ruling, instead relisting the case for the upcoming term and expanding the issue at hand to whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can be squared with the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution.

Ms. Landry was the defendant in the cases, but said her position has been “unique” in that she has consistently argued that creating two majority-Black districts violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

“Courts are still grappling with the complex interplay between Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (‘VRA’) and the offensive, demeaning, and unconstitutional practice of assigning voters to districting plans based on race,” Ms. Landry argued Wednesday in her new filing.

The non-Black voters challenging the map also took issue with the high court’s precedent, particularly a 1986 case, known as Gingles, in which the justices pushed states to elevate race-based voting practices in their map-drawing decisions.

“As Louisiana’s experience shows, the process is the punishment,” the non-Black voters said Wednesday in their court filing. “An ever-present ‘effects’ test entrenches race-based thinking in districting, guarantees the persistence of race-based remedies long after intentional discrimination withers away, and makes race a permanent casus belli. It must end. It can end.”

Legislative maps are typically redrawn every 10 years to reflect population changes noted in the country’s decennial census.

Defenders of the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 say Louisiana’s earlier map with only one majority-Black district “cracked and diluted” Black voters’ power by spreading them across multiple other districts. They characterize the new two-district map as a reasonable balance between race and political calculations.

And even if the new map is too extreme, that doesn’t mean Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is the problem, the challengers argued in their own brief to the justices.

“The ongoing pattern of racial discrimination in voting in the state makes Louisiana the prototypical case for the ongoing need for Section 2, not for abandoning it,” the challengers argued.

The current map, adopted by the state ahead of the 2024 election, carves out two of Louisiana’s six congressional districts as majority Black. The result is that the state went from a 5-1 Republican delegation to 4-2.

The case will be heard before the justices during their upcoming 2025-2026 term, which begins in October.