WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday effectively ordered Louisiana to hold this fall’s congressional elections using two Black majority districts instead of one.
The high court did so by suspending a three-judge panel’s decision that threw out a map drawn by the Louisiana Legislature in January to create two minority-majority districts.
In agreeing to sort out Louisiana’s congressional lines, which will take months, the Supreme Court’s suspension of the panel’s decision "pending the timely docketing of the appeal" allows the Nov. 5 elections to occur under an interim map – the last one available, passed in January by the Legislature.
The Legislature’s January map created a second district intended to give Blacks an opportunity to elect someone better representative of their interests by linking predominantly Black neighborhoods in and around Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Alexandria, Natchitoches, and Shreveport.
The Legislature’s configuration put White majorities in the districts of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, the chamber’s two top leaders, as well as in the district of Rep. Julia Letlow, R-Start, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, which gets first crack at how federal funds are spent.
To ensure all six of the state’s congressional districts held a like number of constituents, the Legislature drew the second Black district in a way that puts Rep. Garret Graves, a Baton Rouge Republican elected from predominantly White areas, into a majority Black district mostly made up of voters he's never represented.
State Reply Emergency Stay Application 05/14/2024
Graves said Wednesday afternoon that he won’t comment.
State Sen. Cleo Fields, a Baton Rouge Democrat, is a likely contender if the second Black majority district holds for the November election.
“It was a decision that the Supreme Court should decide to make it final and give people certainty across the state,” Fields said Wednesday.
The Legislature's map was rejected last month by a special three-judge panel chosen by 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Priscilla Richman. In writing the majority opinion for the panel, U.S. District Judges Judge Robert R. Summerhays and David C. Joseph, both nominated by President Donald Trump and sitting in Lafayette, ruled the Legislature’s map was an “impermissible racial gerrymander” that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which generally disallows predominantly using race to draw district lines.
“The unusual shape of the district reflects an effort to incorporate as much of the dispersed Black population as was necessary to create a majority-Black district,” the majority concluded.
The panel’s third participant, Judge Carl E. Stewart of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, dissented, saying the majority judges put a "tightly wrapped straight-jacket" on state decision-making to find the map violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Robinson Intervenors Stay Reply 05/14/2024
The state and several groups of Black voters countered that, to the extent race was considered by the Legislature, the drawing of the new boundaries aligned with the standards courts have articulated over the past half century in interpreting Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965 to enforce century-old Constitutional protections for minorities to participate in elections.
State Attorney General Liz Murrill noted that the high court had stayed a similar case in the past. If the Supreme Court refused to stay the panel’s decision, then “this case will be a roadmap for federal courts to second-guess State election officials at will,” creating confusion in elections, Murrill contended.
The Supreme Court's stay came on the day the state argued was the deadline for using the Legislature’s configuration for the November election. That would give enough time for Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry to reassign the state’s voters to their new congressional districts in her office’s computer system.
“The Secretary of State has consistently stated she needed a map by May 15,” Murrill said Wednesday in a statement. “The plaintiffs did not contest it at trial. We will continue to defend the law and are grateful the Supreme Court granted the stay which will ensure we have a stable election season.”
In the alternative, the state said it would have to use the 2022 maps that elected the five White Republicans and one Black Democrat who now sit in the House and must run for reelection this fall. That configuration is already in the state’s computer system.
But those 2022 election districts were unconditionally revoked by the Legislature when passing its January configuration.
Additionally, U.S. District Chief Judge Shelly Dick, of Baton Rouge, opined in a related case that Blacks made up a third of the state’s population and live close enough together to create a second minority-majority district as required under the Voting Rights Act. She noted that Louisiana had never elected a Black congressional candidate in a White majority district, which means Black voters could not elect someone who better represented their interests unless that second district was created.
Another 5th Circuit panel found that Dick “did not clearly err in its necessary fact-findings nor commit legal error in its conclusions.”
Edward Greim, the Kansas City lawyer who represented a dozen plaintiffs who challenged the Legislature’s map, said Wednesday in a statement: “The state assumed that just because of the color of their skin, a voter must have particular beliefs, political preferences, and yes, even cast particular votes. All sides agree that it is long past time for our country to move past such thinking.”
Supreme Court Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, both nominated by Democratic presidents, would have denied the applications for a stay. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“The Louisiana Legislature, two Governors, civil rights organizations, voters, and jurists at every level of our federal system have weighed in on these challenges,” Jackson wrote. “Rather than wading in now, I would have let the (panel’s) remedial process run its course before considering whether our emergency intervention was warranted.”