CNN
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The Supreme Court on Monday allowed Louisiana’s congressional map to be redrawn to add another majority-black district.
The justices reversed plans to hear the case themselves and lifted a stay they placed on a lower court’s order for a reworked redistricting scheme. No dissents were observed.
The high court’s decision follows a justice ruling earlier this month on Alabama’s congressional maps that upheld how courts have historically approached redistricting provisions in the Bill of Rights vote, the landmark civil rights law that black voters are using to challenge Louisiana. Congress plan.
“Today’s decision follows the court’s 5-4 ruling earlier this month that said Alabama must also redraw its congressional district maps to include a second majority and minority district.” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
“And like the Alabama ruling, it does not explain why the court had nevertheless issued emergency relief to allow Louisiana to use its illegal maps through the 2022 midterms,” Vladeck added. “It puts the court’s interventions last year into ever sharper perspective.”
The new order means lower court proceedings in the case, which were suspended by the Conservative majority at the end of June last year, will be restarted. At the time, a merits panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals was preparing for an expedited review of a judge’s ruling that said the 5-1 congressional plan likely violated the voting rights
The judge, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick, had been considering a remedial plan from Congress, after Louisiana lawmakers refused to approve a plan with a majority-black second district.
The justices said Monday that their latest move “will allow the matter to go before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for review in the regular course and before Louisiana’s 2024 congressional elections.”
Louisiana state officials were sued last year over a congressional map, approved by the Republican legislature over Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ veto, that made only one of its six districts black, even though the The 2020 census showed that the state’s population is 33% Black.
More than a year ago, Dick ordered the map redrawn to add a second majority-black district to the congressional plan, finding that the Republican-drawn map likely violated prohibitions in the Voting Rights Act against racial discrimination when voting.
The judge wrote that “evidence of Louisiana’s long and continuing history of voting-related discrimination weighs heavily in favor” of the arguments made by the Louisiana state conference of the NAACP and the other challengers who filed the case.
The case, known as Robinson v. Ardoin, then went to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a very conservative appeals court, and a three-judge appeals court, which included two judges of circuit Republican appointees, refused to put Dick’s order. to hold. The appeals court expedited a fuller review of the case, but those proceedings were frozen last summer after Louisiana officials successfully sought Supreme Court intervention. The Supreme Court in late June of last year took up the case but put it on hold while it decided the challenge to Alabama’s map.
In filings after the Alabama decision, lawyers for Louisiana’s Republican state officials argued that the Louisiana dispute presented a “unique situation” that would allow the high court to resolve legal questions about the Voting Rights Act that , according to them, left open by the government of Alabama, known as Milligan.
“Today’s decision in Milligan does not address the district court’s significant errors of law that should warrant reversal,” the Louisiana filing said.
State opponents countered that the district court in the Louisiana case had ruled that the 5-1 map likely violated the Voting Rights Act under the exact same legal test that the Supreme Court sanctioned in its ruling of Alabama.
“Plaintiffs in both Milligan and Robinson presented the kind of evidence this Court has long required and has now reaffirmed in Milligan as sufficient to show a violation of (Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act),” said the presentation of the challengers of the map.
One of the lawyers who challenged the map, Abha Khanna of the Elias Group, applauded the Supreme Court’s decision to send the case back to lower courts.
“In dismissing this case as granted on an impromptu basis, the Supreme Court once again affirmed the power of the Voting Rights Act to prevent racially discriminatory redistricting, this time in Louisiana,” Khanna said in a statement . “Black voters in Louisiana have suffered an election under a congressional map that illegally dilutes their political influence. Fortunately, Louisiana is on track to add an additional minority opportunity district in time for 2024, ensuring – know that Louisiana blacks finally have fair representation in the state’s congressional delegation.
Angelique Freel, director of the civil division of the Louisiana attorney general’s office, said, “Our job is to uphold what the legislature passed, and we trust that the 5th Circuit will review the merits under the law.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
