US supreme court orders Louisiana to redraw map, Voting Rights Act case
The US supreme court ruled that Louisiana must redraw its congressional map in the voting rights act case Louisiana v Callais. The decision leaves the state to replace a map that had used only one district with a Black majority, even though Black people are about a third of Louisiana's population.
Louisiana v Callais
The case has turned on how much lawmakers may consider race when they redraw districts to ensure that Black voters are adequately represented. After the 2020 census, Louisiana's Republican-controlled legislature drew a new map with Black voters as a majority in just one district. Black voters sued in 2022 under the Voting Rights Act, saying the map diluted their influence by packing them into one district and spreading them across the rest.
A federal judge then blocked Louisiana from using that map and ordered a new one with a second majority-Black district. Louisiana drew one that stretched diagonally across the state from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, and a group of non-Black voters challenged it on the ground that voters had been sorted by race in violation of the 14th amendment's equal protection guarantee.
March Oral Arguments
A three-judge panel agreed with those plaintiffs and blocked the new map from taking effect last year. The supreme court later paused that ruling, allowing the remedial map to be used in the 2024 election, where Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the seat.
During oral arguments in March, Edward Greim said it was obvious that race had predominated in drawing the district because it was so irregularly shaped. Lawyers for Louisiana and the Black voters said the shape reflected a different goal: preserving the safe seats of Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise and Julia Letlow, and rejecting a more compact district for that reason.
Section 2 Question
The justices also asked lawyers to re-argue the case last fall and to focus on whether section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was constitutional. The ruling now sends Louisiana back to the drawing board, with the shape and makeup of its congressional districts again at the center of the dispute.
