The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to overturn race-based redistricting ahead of oral arguments in a case stemming from the intentional creation of a second majority Black district in Louisiana.
In a brief to the high court, the DOJ argued that the creation of Louisiana’s second Black majority district – established to comply with a separate court order – was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The government also asked the justices to revisit the court’s ruling from 1986 in Thornburg v. Gingles, which established a three-pronged test for proving vote dilution under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“Properly construed, Section 2’s ‘results’ test should never have compelled race-predominant districting,” the brief said. “But that has been the consequence of misguided applications of the vague framework for vote-dilution claims established in Thornburg v. Gingles. This Court should modify that judge-made framework to address the constitutional problems that it has created.”
A second round of arguments in Louisiana v. Callais is scheduled to begin Oct. 15 – less than four months after the justices heard the initial oral arguments in the case and declined to render a decision.
The Washington Examiner reported that the case stems from Louisiana’s congressional map, which has faced court challenges since its inception. After the Republican-controlled Legislature drew a map that contained a single Black majority Democrat-represented district, the state was sued for violating Section 2, with the argument being that the Black population was such that a second Black majority district was warranted.
The new congressional map that came out of that lawsuit, which included a second Black majority district, created a 4-2 split between Republican and Democratic seats, according to the Examiner, but led to another court challenge over an alleged unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told the Supreme Court last month that the state would not defend the congressional map, arguing that the Section 2 framework under Gingles should be overturned. The Justice Department later joined the state in supporting that position, arguing that Gingles has been used politically instead of for its intended purpose of addressing racial discrimination in the voting process.
“In short, this Court’s Section 2 jurisprudence should account for the fact that, today, a State’s failure to create a compact majority-minority district, even where demographically possible, is far more likely to reflect political motives than racial ones,” the brief said. “Too often, Section 2 is deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action to undo a State’s constitutional pursuit of political ends. That misuse of Section 2 is unconstitutional.”
The high court’s ruling on the case could potentially have far-reaching implications for congressional maps in southern states where concerns about Section 2 compliance have spurred the creation of majority-minority voting districts.
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