Louisiana urges Supreme Court to uphold order barring race-based redistricting map

Writing that it “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination,” Louisiana on Wednesday told the Supreme Court in the case of Louisiana v. Callais to leave in place a ruling by a three-judge federal court that threw out the state’s 2024 congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district. Wednesday’s filing was a change from the position that the state took during earlier Supreme Court proceedings in this case, when it defended the constitutionality of the map. But echoing an argument that it previously made, Louisiana contended on Wednesday that race-based redistricting is unconstitutional and cannot be authorized by a desire to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars election practices that result in a denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on race.

In their own Wednesday filing, a group of Black voters countered that the Voting Rights Act “is the crown jewel of civil rights legislation” and urged the justices to reinstate the 2024 map. “Properly applied,” they wrote, Section 2 “is a quintessential civil rights law at the heart of Congress’s enforcement authority: It authorizes some consideration of race, but only when doing so is required to remedy identified racial discrimination.”

The dispute now before the court began in 2022, when the Louisiana Legislature adopted a congressional map that included only one majority-Black district out of six. The Black voters challenged the map in federal court, arguing that the 2022 map diluted the votes of Black residents, who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population.

A federal district court agreed with the Black voters that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2 of the VRA. It prohibited the state from using the map for future elections, and it ordered the state to draw a new map that included a second majority-Black district. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that decision.

In 2024, the state drew a new map with a second majority-Black district. A lawsuit followed, this time from a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” and contend that the map, known as S.B. 8, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – that is, it sorted voters based primarily on their race. 

A different federal district court – made up of three judges – ruled for the “non-African American” challengers and barred the state from using the 2024 map. The Supreme Court put that decision on hold in May 2024, allowing the state to use the map in the 2024 election, and in November it set the case for oral argument in March 2025.

Louisiana urged the Supreme Court to give it and other states what it characterized as “breathing room” “between the competing demands of” the VRA and the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which bars the government from treating people differently based on race without a good reason to do so. Any focus on race in drawing the 2024 map, the state maintained, came only from its desire to comply with the court orders requiring it to create a second majority-Black district. After the decision to create that second district had been made, the state continued, its focus was on politics – specifically, a desire to protect high-profile Republican incumbents, like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee.

In a departure from its normal practice, the court did not issue a decision in the case before its summer recess. Instead, on June 27, the justices announced that they would hear a second round of oral arguments during the 2025-26 term. Just over a month later, the court instructed the litigants to file new briefs discussing whether Louisiana’s intentional creation of a second majority-Black district violates either the 14th Amendment or the 15th Amendment, which bars both the federal government and states from denying or abridging the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Both amendments were added to the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War in an effort to establish equality for formerly enslaved people.

In a 47-page brief filed on Wednesday, Louisiana’s answer to the question posed by the court was “yes.” The state explained that it had defended the 2024 map “because this Court’s current precedents permit it, and two federal courts directed it—but we have never backed away from our conviction that race-based redistricting is unconstitutional.”

“There is,” Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga wrote, “no safe harbor for racial discrimination the government deems good discrimination.” And, he added, “[r]ace-based redistricting in the name of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … should be no exception.”

Aguiñaga also emphasized that “[t]he amount of time, money, and resources Louisiana has dedicated to whether it sufficiently discriminated against black and white voters is astronomical.” But “[u]nless something changes,” he warned, “the entire cycle will repeat itself after the 2030 Census.”

The Black voters warned that dire consequences would follow if the district court’s ruling were left in place. “Removing §2’s protections in Louisiana will not end discrimination there or lead to a race-blind society,” wrote Stuart Naifeh of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which (among other organizations) represents the voters, “but it may well lead to a severe decrease in minority representation at all levels of government in many parts of the country.”

The Black voters also pushed back against arguments that race-based redistricting under Section 2 should have an expiration date. Section 2’s “built-in focus on current conditions obviates the need for a sunset date,” Naifeh argued.

Finally, Naifeh told the justices, even if the court concludes that “the Legislature’s consideration of race” in the 2024 map “exceeded §2’s careful constitutional constraints,” the court should send the case back to the lower court for the creation of a new map “to remedy the §2 violation identified in” the challenge to the 2022 map.

Wednesday’s filings in the Louisiana case came one day after Alabama asked the court to review, without waiting for a federal appeals court to weigh in, a ruling by a federal district court that blocked the state from using a map that it had created in 2023 with one majority-Black district. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision prohibiting virtually all uses of race in university admissions, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour Jr. wrote, there is now no longer any constitutional basis for race-based redistricting. Although “racial discrimination in voting practices was an ‘extraordinary problem’ and ‘pervasive evil’” when the Voting Rights Act was enacted more than a half-century ago, “no one contends that the same degree of ‘pervasive evil’ persists” now, LaCour contended.

The “non-African American” challengers have been directed by the Supreme Court to file their brief on or before Wednesday, Sept. 17.