Voting rights saga over race-based redistricting comes to US supreme court

The US supreme court will hear a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional districts on Monday in a case that could be a vehicle for the court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and give lawmakers more leeway to draw districts that sort voters based on race.

The case, Louisiana v Callais, arrives at the supreme court after years of legal wrangling over Louisiana’s congressional map.

After the 2020 census, Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature only drew one majority-Black congressional district when it redrew the boundaries for the state’s six seats in Congress. A group of Black voters, who make up about a third of the state’s population, sued the state in 2022, arguing that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, required lawmakers to add a second majority-Black congressional district.

A federal judge agreed with that argument, blocked the state from using the map, and told the state to add a second majority-Black district, which it did.

A group of non-African American voters then sued in a different court, saying the new map unconstitutionally sorted voters based on their race. They pointed out that the new district was unusually shaped and that race had predominated in drawing it. A court struck down Louisiana’s new map in 2024, but the US supreme court allowed it to be used for elections last year. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, won the seat last fall.

The 14th amendment prohibits discriminating on the basis of race, and courts have prohibited mapmakers from moving voters into districts based on their race. However, the supreme court has long allowed mapmakers to consider race if it serves a “compelling interest” and its use is “narrowly tailored” to that interest. The court has also “long assumed that one compelling interest is complying with operative provisions of the Voting Rights Act”, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a 2017 majority opinion.

Those challenging Louisiana’s map say that the state did not meet that standard. They point repeatedly to the fact that the new majority-Black district is irregularly shaped, stretching “250 miles in a jagged slash mark” from Shreveport in the north-west of the state to Baton Rouge in the middle.

“The State of Louisiana should be ashamed. Under no compulsion, it used racial identity to sift Appellees and thousands of other voters into U.S. House districts for the 2024 election,” they wrote in a brief to the supreme court. “The district court easily identified Louisiana’s racial gerrymander and found it unjustified even with ‘breathing room’ for legitimate VRA compliance efforts.”

The Black voters who challenged the maps argue Louisiana lawmakers did not prioritize race and were also focused on politics when they adopted the new map. The district is so irregularly shaped because they wanted to protect the seats of Republican incumbents in Congress, including House speaker Mike Johnson and House majority leader Steve Scalise, they argued. They point out that they presented several alternative maps that would have created a second majority-Black district but were more compact.

“‘Politics drove the specific design of the remedial district adopted in the 2024 special session, with race a ‘secondary consideration’ to ensure §2 compliance,” lawyers for the voters wrote in a brief to the court.

A ruling in favor of the non-African American voters who challenged the districts could further chip away at the Voting Rights Act by making it nearly impossible for lawmakers to draw districts that comply with the landmark civil rights law.

“It would basically lead to just endless collateral attacks on maps that were drawn to remedy Voting Rights Act violations and even potentially existing districts that are compliant with section 2,” said Sara Rohani, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represents the voters who challenged the original map in Louisiana and is arguing in defense of the current one.

The case is the most recent in a series of cases the court has heard in recent years dealing with race and redistricting. Last year, the justices made it harder to win suits that allege voters have been unlawfully sorted based on their race and said South Carolina lawmakers had acted lawfully when they moved 30,000 Black voters from one congressional district to another to make a district more Republican.

Lawyers for Louisiana argued in briefs to the court that they were in an “impossible situation” in which they were being accused of violating the US constitution because of their efforts to comply with the Voting Rights Act. “Whatever Louisiana does, it will be sued again and again.”

But Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, was unsympathetic to that claim. He noted that there were other maps the state could have chosen that would have withstood legal scrutiny.

“They chose the one that would be most likely to draw a racial gerrymandering challenge,” he said. “The state is in this ‘impossible position’ because they chose to layer in political goals.”

While the court may not take up the invitation to further limit section 2, Li said the case could ultimately give lawmakers more pretext to draw districts that sort voters based on race.

“In the future, you could see a situation where people aggressively pack minority voters or split up minority communities in ways that seem very racially discriminatory, but also could be defended on the basis of politics,” he said. “It just sort of encourages everybody to put the label politics on maps in the future. And if courts aren’t willing to closely examine whether it’s really politics or something else, then people get away with it.”