The Supreme Court has intervened in Louisiana's yearslong redistricting dispute. Wednesday's decision by the conservative-leaning judiciary creates an additional minority-majority district, likely ensuring Democrats gain a congressional seat in November.
However, the high court's decision seems to apply only to the 2024 election cycle.
NPR's Tina Totenberg has more:
At the same time that the court upheld the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, the justices said that a new challenge to the second district could be filed, a challenge that the court would hear next term, too late for the 2024 election, but with the potential to hobble what remains of the Voting Rights Act.
The 6-to-3 vote in the case was a difficult to understand, with the court's six conservative justices voting to allow the Louisiana plan for two majority-Black districts to go into effect, while the court's three liberals would not have intervened at this point. Election Expert Rick Hasen said that the liberals likely disagreed because Wednesday's case appears to give the court an additional tool to OK or veto congressional redistricting plans months before an election.
The Louisiana congressional redistricting has had a tortured history since the 2020 Census. In 2022, a federal district court ruled that the new map drawn by the state legislature violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the Black vote. In a state that has six congressional seats, and a 31.4% Black population, only one district was majority Black. The state subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court, but the justices put the case on hold in 2022 while it considered a similar redistricting case from Alabama, and in the interim, the state used a plan that had been held to violate the the Voting Rights Act.
When the justices decided the Alabama case last June, however, they ruled in favor of the Black voters, declaring that the Alabama map had violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the Black vote instead of adopting a reasonable map that included two majority or near-majority Black voters. At the same time, the justices retracted their earlier decision to grant Louisiana's petition for review, instead sending the case back to the court of appeals to either draw new congressional lines itself or allow the state legislature to do it.
The ruling follows a decision by a federal court to invalidate a map that could have allowed Black voters in Louisiana to elect a second African American representative.
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