In an effort to eliminate racial bias in redistricting, Louisiana has petitioned the Supreme Court to strike down the Act’s core provision.
The state’s brief, sent on Wednesday, formally asked the court to reverse a seminal 1986 decision that laid out the criteria for determining whether a voting map unconstitutionally suppresses minority votes. States with large minority voting populations are obligated to create districts that are reflective of their voting strength, according to the long-standing interpretation of the Thornburg v. Gingles decision.
“Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” wrote Republican Liz Murrill of Louisiana and other state lawyers.
The author from Louisiana expressed their desire for Gingles to be “workable, coherent, predictable, and constitutional” after decades of efforts and several court decisions. “Gingles should be overruled because Louisiana’s experience shows that he cannot be reformed.”
Along with that, Louisiana informed the Supreme Court that it had taken the uncommon step of declining to defend the present congressional map of the state. Among the six House seats in the state, that plan includes two districts with a majority of Black residents. The state said it was “coerced” into adopting the map by federal courts monitoring its adherence to the Voting Rights Act.
Importantly, the legislation forbids, in broad strokes, any kind of electoral discrimination on the basis of race, color, or linguistic minority status (Section 2). Section 2 of the redistricting law mandated the creation of “majority-minority districts,” with the goal of ensuring that voters of color, whether they be Black, Latino, or Asian, have a real say in who represents them in government.
Racial gerrymandering is a method that states used to purposefully draw electoral districts in a way that disenfranchised people of color, particularly Black people in the South. This practice is meant to rectify that.
This “race-based redistricting” “violates fundamental equal protection principles,” according to Louisiana, who contends that it is unlawful.
On October 15, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the Louisiana case; a ruling is anticipated by June 20, 2026.
Louisiana bases its arguments on the 2023 ruling of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the conservative majority essentially abolished racial affirmative action in higher education by striking down race-conscious admissions.
As far as the “color blind” Constitution is concerned, “the invidious classifications underlying race-based redistricting present the last significant battle,” as stated by Louisiana.
But this fight is a piece of cake. According to SFFA, “[e]liminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” as the state went on to say. “That means redistricting based on race will not be tolerated.”
Even though Black people constitute over a third of Louisiana’s voters, just one of the six congressional districts in the state’s original 2020 census map was majority-Black.
A second seat with a majority of Black voters was ordered to be drawn after a federal judge found that Louisiana probably violated the Voting Rights Act by weakening the voices of Black voters. A lower court agreed with a group of non-Black voters who claimed the new map discriminated against them based on race, after which the GOP-dominated state legislature originally cooperated.
At the March hearing before the Supreme Court, Louisiana argued in favor of its map. The Supreme Court, however, made the unprecedented decision to announce that it will rehear the case earlier this summer.
The judges issued a brief order earlier this month in which they asked the parties to be ready to demonstrate that the Constitution is violated by the “intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district.”
Under Chief Justice John Roberts’s leadership, the Supreme Court has taken a typically negative stance toward the Voting Rights Act for the past fifteen years. Both the VRA in general and Section 2 have been undermined by a number of decisions, especially since the high court made the other main provision of the statute irrelevant in 2013.
With the re-argument scheduled for October 15th, it is unclear who will represent Louisiana’s map in front of the state’s highest court. Earlier arguments included a group of Black voters represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, and other attorneys. One of these attorneys even appeared before the Supreme Court earlier this year.
Also submitted on Wednesday was a document by LDF that argued in favor of keeping the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 and asked the court to keep the map.
Racial prejudice is still very much alive and well in Louisiana, they stated. “And the appellees have failed to provide any evidence that the state abruptly abandoned its history of discrimination and made the protections afforded by Section 2 irrelevant in January 2024.”