Group of Louisiana voters urges Supreme Court to strike down major provision of the Voting Rights Act

Lawyers representing a group of Louisiana voters challenging the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in the state told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act is “inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the Constitution.”

The filing came in a dispute that could lead to a major decision on voting rights and redistricting. The dispute began several years ago, when a group of Black voters filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the congressional map adopted by the Louisiana Legislature in 2022. That map contained only one majority-Black district, although nearly a third of the state’s population is Black. The Black voters contended that the 2022 map diluted the votes of Black residents.

A federal district court agreed with the Black voters that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld that ruling, and it instructed Louisiana to draw a new map by Jan. 15, 2024. If it failed to do so, the state could face the prospect that the district court would draw one instead.

After the Louisiana Legislature adopted a new map that contained a second majority-Black district, the challengers in the case now before the court – who describe themselves as “non-African American” – went to federal court, where they argued that the 2024 map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – that is, it unconstitutionally sorted the state’s voters based primarily on their race.

A three-judge federal district court agreed with the challengers, but the Supreme Court paused that court’s ruling, allowing the state to use the 2024 map in the 2024 elections.

When the case first came to the Supreme Court, Louisiana told the justices that it was stuck between a rock and a hard place: On the one hand, it needed to comply with the VRA, but on the other hand it also needed to comply with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which prohibits the government from treating people differently unless there is an adequate reason. To the extent that it had considered race in drawing the 2024 map, the state contended, it did so only to comply with the court orders in the earlier litigation requiring it to create a second majority-Black district. But once it knew that it had to draw the second district, it said, it focused on protecting two of the state’s high-profile Republican incumbents, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee.

The ”non-African American” voters argued that the Legislature had “’first made the decision’ to impose the racial quota” of two majority-Black districts, and then focused on politics. But even if compliance with the VRA was Louisiana’s true goal, they wrote, that shows that race was the primary factor driving its decision to draw the second majority-Black district.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case in March. On June 27, the justices announced that they would hear arguments in the case again during the 2025-26 term; they later directed the litigants to address a specific question: 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 enacted in the wake of the Civil War in an effort to establish equality for formerly enslaved persons.

In briefs filed at the Supreme Court late last month, Louisiana urged the justices to leave the lower court’s ruling that struck down the 2024 map in place, telling them that it “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination.” Race-based redistricting is unconstitutional, the state wrote, even if it occurs as a result of a desire to comply with Section 2. The Black voters, by contrast, continued to defend both the 2024 map and the VRA, telling the justices that the law “is the crown jewel of civil rights legislation.”

In their briefs on Wednesday, the “non-African American” voters argued that Section 2 “heavily impinges on States’ sovereign power to regulate their elections and draw congressional districts.” Moreover, they added, “remedial ‘race-based districting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.’”

The voters urged the Supreme Court to send the case back to the lower court quickly with instructions to “expeditiously finish what it almost completed in early 2024: a map based on traditional redistricting principles unburdened by any VRA quota.”

In a separate brief, Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry agreed with the state’s argument, made in its brief on Aug. 27, that Section 2 violates the Constitution. But in any event, she added, because Louisiana’s Black population is geographically dispersed, “the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district by slicing and dicing various communities, sometimes hundreds of miles apart, runs afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”