Following Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that un-froze a lower court decision ordering Louisiana to draw a new congressional map, the state is back on track to add a second district where Black voters will be likely to elect their candidate of choice. However, even though the Supreme Court said it expected that the case would be reviewed “in advance of the 2024 congressional elections,” the notoriously conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals will have the opportunity to slow-walk a resolution, potentially preventing Black voters from vindicating their rights for yet another election cycle.
Last year, it was the Supreme Court that stymied Black voters. A federal district court judge ruled in June that Republican lawmakers in Louisiana had likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by failing to create a second congressional district that would allow Black voters to elect their preferred candidates and instructed the state to correct the problem. But just before the court could implement a remedial map in time for the midterms, the Supreme Court put the case on hold pending the outcome of a closely related Alabama lawsuit.
That Alabama case proved to be a shocker: While legal observers had almost universally expected the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority to use the dispute as a way to further undermine what remained of the VRA, an unlikely grouping of five justices wound up agreeing with the lower court. As a result, Alabama will now have to establish a second Black-majority district. And because the Louisiana suit rests on very similar arguments, the Supreme Court has now given the green light for that case to proceed once more as well.
Before the high court intervened last year to put the Louisiana matter on hold, in fact, it had already proceeded quite far. After determining that the GOP’s map had likely violated the VRA, Judge Shelly Dick gave the legislature the first crack at drafting a new plan, but Republicans failed to take action by the court's deadline. The judge then asked the parties to submit their own proposals for maps that would comply with the VRA. Republicans once again refused to participate, but the plaintiffs, led by the state branch of the NAACP, presented a plan drawn by redistricting expert Anthony Fairfax.
That plan is shown at the top of this post, alongside Louisiana's current congressional map (a larger version can be found here, and interactive versions of both can be found here). By linking the cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Republican legislators were able to pack a large number of Black voters into the 2nd District (shown in green) while scattering them elsewhere. That ensured that Louisiana's five other districts would remain majority-white and therefore solidly Republican, despite the fact that a third of the state is African American.
The plaintiffs' map, by contrast, separates the two cities, giving the 5th District (in yellow) a Black majority, just like the 2nd. As a consequence, both districts would likely elect the type of candidates preferred by Black voters—almost certainly Black Democrats, like Rep. Troy Carter, who represents the current 2nd District.
Despite Republican lawmakers’ past intransigence, the judge will probably give them another chance to prepare a new map. But once again, they may not comply—at least, not with alacrity. While the Supreme Court won’t bail them out this time, the 5th Circuit might. That ultraconservative appellate court would field any further appeals, and as legal expert Rick Hasen suggests, those judges are very likely to be hostile to plaintiffs’ arguments, despite the Supreme Court’s Alabama ruling. (The Alabama case differs from the Louisiana case in one key aspect: Due to a particular federal law invoked in the former but not the latter, all appeals in the Alabama lawsuit go directly to the Supreme Court.)
Should the 5th Circuit abet Republicans in delaying a final resolution, implementation of a new map could get pushed past the 2024 elections, further perpetuating the discrimination Black voters have faced in Louisiana. Plaintiffs, however, will be on guard for any such dilatory tactics and might ultimately have to count on further intervention by the most unlikely of allies in any voting rights case: the United State Supreme Court.
David Nir June 26, 2023 at 05:00PM From Daily Kos
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