WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to interfere with the hearing schedule for the redrawing of Louisiana’s congressional maps.
Louisiana had asked the justices to block a Fifth Circuit ruling that axed a lower court hearing set to choose a new congressional map. The state was forced to redraw its districts following the high court’s June ruling in Allen v. Milligan.
According to civil rights groups who brought the application, Louisiana has attempted to delay that process.
“The state has succeeded in introducing a delay, which in our view is what they've been after the entire time, not any actual principled reason for the delay, just delay for its own sake for them get to 2024 without a new map,” said Stuart Charles Naifeh, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
None of the justices dissented from the order, but Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson clarified her decision in the case. Jackson said she did not endorse the extraordinary legal tool used to delay the hearing and that Louisiana should still have new maps before the 2024 election.
“As we have previously emphasized, this litigation should be resolved ‘in advance of the 2024 congressional elections in Louisiana,’” the Biden appointee wrote. “To that end, I read the Fifth Circuit’s mandamus ruling to require the District Court to delay its remedial hearing only until the Louisiana Legislature has had sufficient time to consider alternative maps that comply with the Voting Rights Act.”
With the second highest percentage of Black residents in the country, Louisiana’s population is nearly one-third Black. Despite this, Black voters in the state were only allowed one majority congressional district when lawmakers conducted redistricting in 2022.
The Louisiana NAACP and other civil rights groups sued, arguing the maps marginalized minority voters and violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race.
A district court agreed and blocked the state from conducting congressional elections using the map. The court said the state needed to add an additional majority Black district to comply with Section 2.
Louisiana’s redistricting fight ran concurrent to a similar fight in Alabama. Lawmakers there were also accused of diluting the votes of Black residents in violation of Section 2. The Supreme Court decided to jump into Alabama’s case, putting Louisiana’s similar claim on hold while the justices reviewed the matter.
The Supreme Court ultimately agreed with voting rights groups that challenged Alabama’s map, ruling that the state had to redraw its congressional maps to add a second majority Black district. Lawmakers in the state resisted that effort, forcing the court to hand down an additional order forcing the redraw.
After ruling in Alabama’s case, the Supreme Court dismissed Louisiana’s high court appeal and sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit. However, when the appeals court declined to act on the state’s request to throw out the district court’s injunction, the lower court set a hearing on the remedial map.
Louisiana moved to block the hearing. The district court denied this motion, citing the extensive litigation in the case. The attorney general and secretary of state then asked the Fifth Circuit to intervene.
Republican lawmakers asked the Fifth Circuit for a court order compelling the district court to cancel the hearing and a conservative three-judge panel granted the Hail-Mary request, removing the matter from the district court’s docket.
The civil rights groups then asked the Supreme Court for emergency intervention. They claim the court has already said these types of orders, writs of mandamus, are only for very rare cases.
“The motions panel usurped the appellate process and asserted unprecedented control of the district court’s ordinary docket management decisions, including whether and when to set a case for trial and whether and when to hold a hearing regarding a remedy for what the district court had already preliminarily enjoined as a likely violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” Naifeh wrote.
Asking for emergency relief, the groups requested that the justices block the Fifth Circuit’s order throwing out the hearing. The groups also suggested the court could take up the issue itself.
“The writ of mandamus injects unjustified and unnecessary delay into remedial proceedings, improperly micromanages the district court’s docket, and interferes with the jurisdiction of a merits panel of the Fifth Circuit that is scheduled to hear argument on the State’s appeal of the preliminary injunction in just one week,” Naifeh wrote.
Louisiana counters that the Fifth Circuit order actually prevented the case from devolving into chaos that would have prevented a solution from being achieved prior to the 2024 elections.
“Since the Fifth Circuit issued the writ, this case is now in fact proceeding — as this Court commanded –– ‘in the ordinary course and in advance of the 2024 congressional elections in Louisiana,’” Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill wrote. “So long as the district court heeds the warning of the Fifth Circuit, it remains possible that the Plaintiffs’ Section 2 claims will be fully resolved before another congressional election cycle. It could not be so without the Fifth Circuit’s intervention.”
The Supreme Court’s refusal to grant the civil rights group’s application allows the delay to persist. The district court rescheduled a hearing to review the state’s maps for February.
Follow @KelseyReichmann
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