LA Halting Congressional Primaries Due To SCOTUS Ruling

Democrats have long used the Voting Rights Act to force states to create racially gerrymandered districts to guarantee Democrats win House seats even in conservative states. However, a recent decision from the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a map creating a majority black district in Louisiana that zig-zags across much of the state. SCOTUS Blog gives the background:

    The decision was the latest, and presumably final, chapter in a long-running dispute arising from Louisiana’s efforts to adopt a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. The first map that the state adopted, in 2022, had one majority-Black district out of the six allotted to the state. A group of Black voters – who comprise roughly one-third of the state’s population – went to federal court, where they alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits discrimination in voting.

    A federal judge agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that ruling. It instructed Louisiana to draw a new map by January 2024 or risk having the court adopt one for it.

    The map that Louisiana drew in 2024 created a second majority-Black district, leading to the election in November of that year of Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s.

    The map also prompted the lawsuit leading to Wednesday’s opinion. It was filed by a group of “non-African American” voters who contended that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by sorting voters based on race. A three-judge federal district court agreed with them and barred the state from using the 2024 map in future elections, but a divided Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling in May 2024.

The Court ordered the parties to submit new briefing to address "whether 'the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates' either the 14th Amendment or the 15th Amendment, which bars the government from denying or restricting voting rights based on race," and set a second hearing date.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections.     

Notwithstanding the lamentations of the Democrats, the Voting Rights Act does not trump the Constitution. As a consequence of the decision, the Louisiana congressional primaries have been suspended pending, presumably, drawing up a new Congressional redistricting map. The consequence of this action is that Republicans will pick up an additional House seat this fall.