SCOTUS delays ruling on constitutionality of second majority-Black district in Louisiana

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court on Friday refused to decide whether Louisiana’s Legislature created an unconstitutional racial gerrymander when adding a second majority-Black district to its congressional maps, ordering another argument next term.

Justice Clarence Thomas, a George H.W. Bush appointee, dissented on the court’s decision to reschedule oral arguments and said Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act should be reviewed.

“For over three decades, I have called for a ‘systematic reassessment of our interpretation of Section 2,” Thomas wrote in a six-page dissent. “I am hopeful that this court will soon realize that the conflict its Section 2 jurisprudence has sown with the Constitution is too severe to ignore.”

In 1965, Congress created Section 2 to prevent voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color or membership in a language minority group.

It was partially amended in 1982 to allow a plaintiff to prove a violation if any such discrimination denied them an “equal opportunity to participate in the political process.”

He described the court’s current interpretation of Section 2 as requiring race-based districting under circumstances that do not address the racial discrimination the the districting is meant to address.

“If voting is racially polarized in a jurisdiction, and if there exists any more or less reasonably configured districting plan that would enable the minority group to constitute a majority in a number of districts roughly proportional to its share of the population, then the jurisdiction must ensure that its districting plan includes that number of majority-minority districts ‘or something quite close,’” Thomas wrote.

Seven lower court judges ruled that Louisiana needed to include two majority-Black districts to remedy a prior violation of the Voting Rights Act, but self-described “non-African Americans” claimed that to comply with the act, the Legislature used race to draw the latest redistricting plan.

A federal court sided with the non-African Americans, pitting the Voting Rights Act against the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.

The protracted fight over congressional districts in Louisiana dates back to 2022 after the Legislature proposed voting maps with only one majority-Black district, though Black voters make up 30% of the voting-age population in the state.

A challenge to the 2022 map landed on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, and the justices allowed Louisiana to keep the single majority-Black district map for the midterm elections.

Thomas repeatedly slammed the high court’s decision in that case, Allen v. Milligan , writing that the decision makes Section 2 toothless and prevents “any real barrier to a district court providing a race-based remedy.”

The case wound its way back to the justices in 2024, this time with another majority-Black district. Offering another pause, the high court ruled that Louisiana could use its 2024 map in the presidential election.

Louisiana’s Sixth Congressional District includes a 250-mile stretch from Shreveport in the northwest to Baton Rouge in the southeast. The 2024 map increased that district’s Black voting-age population from 24% to 54%. The state and civil rights groups argue that politics, not race, was the driving force behind the new map.

Without the Legislature’s intervention, Louisiana said U.S. Representative Julia Letlow, a Republican, would have been placed in a majority-Democrat district. The state said it drew its map to protect high-profile incumbents, including House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Louisiana maintained that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional as applied — the same argument used by the non-African Americans. Section 2 prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or certain languages. The state was forced to put that position aside in March when it defended the 2024 map at the Supreme Court.

“These cases put the court to a choice: It may permit patent racial gerrymandering under the auspices of Section 2 compliance, or it may admit that, as the court has construed the statute, a violation of Section 2 is insufficient to justify a race-based remedy,” Thomas wrote. “That decision should be straightforward. Nevertheless, the court demurs.”

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