WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in a hugely consequential Louisiana redistricting case was less surprising than the way the votes on the high court broke down.
Creating strange bedfellows and puzzling court observers, the court's six-member conservative bloc united to pause a lower court's ruling, which had struck down a map that gave Louisiana a second majority-Black congressional district. The outcome was a win for Democrats, who now have a very strong chance of gaining a seat in the closely contested U.S. House this fall.
The court's three-member liberal wing, meanwhile, also voted together, opposing the majority opinion — an opinion that was hailed by Black voter groups. Had the liberals been victorious, Louisiana might well have gone back to the map it used in 2022, a map that elected five White Republicans and one Black Democrat.
So what gives?
The Brennan Center’s Michael Li, who is not involved in the case but as a redistricting expert is watching closely, noted the high court majority said nothing about the merits of the legal challenge and, in fact, hasn’t decided yet whether to even hear the Louisiana case. The order merely suspended a lower court’s ruling that had thrown out the Legislature’s map with two Black opportunity districts, thereby reinstituting the Legislature’s map for use in the Nov. 5 election.
Li surmised that the three liberal justices’ dissent was tied to the reliance by the six conservative justices on a protocol, called the Purcell doctrine, that returned to the status quo on the grounds that sorting out the issues would take too long and the election was too near, Li said.
“The conservative and liberal justices followed what they had done before,” Li said.
The three liberal justices routinely oppose applying Purcell because legislatures around the country have often used it to cut off litigation and stall changes to their states’ election systems that would benefit minorities, according to voting rights advocates.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the only one of the liberal justices to pen an opinion, suggested there was plenty of time to draw a suitable map for Louisiana's November election.
“There is little risk of voter confusion from a new map being imposed this far out from the November election,” she wrote in her dissent.
Marc Elias, of the left-leaning voting rights group Democracy Docket, sought to parse the incongruous lineup of justices in a podcast. “Conservative justices seem to think … it is simply too late to start over drawing new maps," he said.
The Supreme Court broke down along the same 6-3 fault lines last week in another congressional map dispute, this one in South Carolina. In that case, the conservative majority struck down a lower court's ruling that the redrawing of two Charleston-area districts diluted Black voter strength.
In doing so, the court sided with South Carolina's legislature, which drew the map.
Rooted in civil rights law
The Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965 to put a halt to provisions like poll taxes and voter tests that limited Black and other minority voters from participating in the elections, even though the U.S. Constitution gave them that right a century earlier. Such gambits were common in Louisiana and other Southern states.
The legal issue now most often before the courts is how states — particularly ones like Louisiana that have never elected a Black candidate from a majority-White district — draw their electoral maps. The act is supposed to ensure that election boundaries are not configured in a way that dilutes Black voter strength.
The Supreme Court invokes the Purcell doctrine to prohibit federal courts from changing election rules on the eve of a political contest, wrote Tanner Lockheed in a recent California Law Review article. But that can lead to other problems.
“Purcell places litigants in an impossible temporal bind by denying them sufficient time to challenge illegal maps before the next election," Lockheed wrote. "As a result, state legislatures are incentivized to enact discriminatory redistricting schemes because legislators know those maps will be immune for at least the first election following decennial redistricting.”
This map, adopted by the Legislature in January, created a second majority-Black U.S. House district stretching along the Red River. It was rejected by a three-judge federal panel, but the Supreme Court stayed that ruling, meaning the map will be used in this fall's elections.
What differs in the Louisiana case is that the state cited Purcell to keep the status quo: the map the Legislature approved in January. It has two majority-Black districts, whereas the one it approved in 2022 had just one.
Attorney General Liz Murrill argued that Secretary of State Nancy Landry needed time to ensure that voters which district they belong in. In requesting the high court to stay the lower court ruling, Murrill contended that unless that decision was suspended, “this case will be a roadmap for federal courts to second-guess State election officials at will, thereby sowing doubt in Purcell caselaw and increasing the likelihood of confusion in election-year cases.”
Responding to previous federal court rulings, the Legislature in January created a second district that links predominantly Black neighborhoods in and around Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Alexandria, Natchitoches, and Shreveport.
The map kept White majorities in the districts of four of Louisiana's five House Republicans: Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton; House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson; and Reps. Julia Letlow, R-Start, and Clay Higgins, R-Lafayette.
The 6th U.S. House District, represented by U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, was dramatically reconfigured by the Legislature in January.
But the new map dramatically reshaped the district of Rep. Garret Graves, a Baton Rouge Republican elected from a predominantly White district. Now, 56% of the voters in the 6th House District, which he represents, are Black.
That map was thrown out in April by a federal panel of three judges. The panel ruled 2-1 that the new map was drawn with race as the dominant factor, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
The dissenting judge concluded that evidence showed that politics — putting Graves, who has made enemies among some powerful Republicans, in a challenging district — played a significant role as well as race, and that the map thus passed constitutional muster.
Nearly identical questions were in play in the South Carolina dispute.
Race vs. politics
If the Supreme Court takes up the Louisiana case, the key issue before the court will be explaining how race and politics can be used in redrawing district lines to better fit population shifts. Previous jurisprudence has said maps must also try to achieve compactness and to keep communities with similar interests joined together.
Plenty of questions have been raised about whether Louisiana's current map with two Black districts achieves those latter goals. Victoria Wenger, who represents one group of Black voters that intervened in the case, notes that several alternative configurations would produce a second Black majority district that is more compact, ties together communities of interest and therefore better fits the Voting Rights Act standards.
The liberal Supreme Court bloc that voted against pausing the Louisiana case may have had such maps in mind.
Assuming that the current map stays in place for the fall election, it will have national ramifications.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a handicapping newsletter run by the University of Virginia Center for Politics, this week rated the 6th District “as safe Democratic and does not seem winnable for a Republican.”
Republicans now hold a razor-thin 217-214 majority over the Democrats in the U.S. House.