WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered Louisiana to hold a 2024 congressional election using a House map with a second predominantly Black district, despite a lower court calling the map illegally racially discriminatory.
The order allows the use of a map that has majority Black populations in two of the state’s six congressional districts, potentially increasing Democrats’ chances of winning control of the closely divided House of Representatives in the 2024 elections.
The justices were responding to emergency appeals filed by the state’s top Republican elected officials and Black voters who said they needed the Supreme Court’s intervention to avoid confusion ahead of the election. About a third of Louisiana is black.
The Supreme Court’s order does not address a lower court ruling that found the map was based too heavily on race. Instead, it simply prevents another novel map from being drawn for this year’s elections.
The Supreme Court could decide at a later date to hear arguments over the decision to close Louisiana’s map.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented from Wednesday’s order. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the justices who rejected the latest map should have had the opportunity to create a novel map before the Supreme Court intervened.
“The risk of voter confusion by introducing a new map so far ahead of the November election is low,” Jackson wrote.
Liberal justices defied previous Supreme Court orders that put election-related decisions on hold. These orders cited the need to give voters and election officials enough time to ensure proper voting. “When an election approaches, the rules of the road must be clear and established,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a similar Alabama case two years ago. The court has never set a difficult deadline for how close is too close.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said she was pleased with the order. “The Secretary of State has stated time and time again that she needs a map by May 15,” Murrill said in an emailed statement. “The plaintiffs did not dispute it in court. We will continue to defend the law and are grateful that the Supreme Court granted the stay that will ensure we have a robust election season.”
A lawyer for black voters praised the court’s actions. “We are very relieved that SCOTUS agreed with us that the election is too close to create uncertainty. … We will have a map with two majority-black counties this fall,” wrote Jared Evans, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, in a text that used an acronym for the Supreme Court.
Edward Greim and Paul Hurd, attorneys for the plaintiffs who challenged the novel map, said Wednesday’s order allows the state to impose a “brutal racial discriminator” on voters in 2024 who cast ballots in “racially segregated” districts become. But they predicted a possible victory in this case.
In Louisiana, two congressional maps have been blocked in federal courts in the past two years in a series of lawsuits that included an earlier Supreme Court intervention.
The state’s Republican-dominated Legislature drew a novel congressional map in 2022 to reflect population shifts reflected in the 2020 census. But the changes effectively maintained the status quo of five majority-Republican-dominated white districts and one Democratic-dominated black district.
Given the size of the state’s black population, civil rights activists challenged the map in federal court in Baton Rouge, winning a ruling from U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick that the districts likely discriminated against black voters.
The Supreme Court put Dick’s ruling on hold while it considered a similar case from Alabama. The justices allowed both states to use the maps in the 2022 election, even though both had been deemed likely to be discriminatory by federal judges.
The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the Alabama ruling and sent the Louisiana case back to federal court in anticipation of novel maps for the 2024 election.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave Louisiana lawmakers a deadline of early 2024 to draw a novel map or face the possibility of a court-mandated map.
New Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, had defended Louisiana’s congressional map as attorney general. But now he is calling on lawmakers to adopt a novel map with a different majority-black district at a special session in January. He supported a map that created a novel majority-black district that stretches across the state, connecting parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas.
Another group of plaintiffs, a group of self-described non-African Americans, filed suit in western Louisiana, claiming that the novel map was also illegal because it was too racially biased, in violation of the Constitution. A divided jury of federal judges ruled 2-1 in their favor in April, blocking use of the novel card.
Landry and Murrill, a Republican ally, argued that the novel map should be used, saying it was adopted because of political considerations — rather than race — as a driving factor. They point out that it provides politically protected districts for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans. Some lawmakers have also pointed out that the only Republican whose district changed significantly in the novel map, Rep. Garret Graves, supported a GOP opponent of Landry in the gubernatorial election last fall. The Graves district change bolsters the argument that politics, not race, was the driving factor, lawmakers said.
Voting patterns show that a novel predominantly black district would give Democrats a chance to capture another House seat and send a second black representative to Congress from Louisiana. Democratic Senator Cleo Fields, a black former congressman, had announced that he would run for Congress in the novel district if elected in the next election.
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McGill reported from New Orleans.
