Louisiana may have to redraw its congressional map to add a second majority-Black district ahead of the 2024 election after a supreme court order on Monday.
The justices on Monday lifted a pause it had imposed in a lawsuit challenging the map last year. Last June, US district judge Shelly Dick ruled that the state’s congressional plan likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to redraw it. Black voters comprise about a third of Louisiana’s population but only make up a majority in one of the state’s six congressional districts. The court paused the ruling while it considered a similar case challenging Alabama’s congressional map.
The court resolved the Alabama case, Allen v Milligan, earlier this month, ruling – in a surprising move – that Alabama had to add a second majority-Black district. The decision shores up the legal precedent to require Louisiana to do the same.
The supreme court’s ruling on Monday means that the case will return to the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit, perhaps the most conservative appellate court in the US. The court previously declined to pause the order requiring Louisiana to redraw the maps.
A second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana would probably be represented by a Democrat. Republicans currently represent five of Louisiana’s six congressional seats.
There are high levels of racially polarized voting in Louisiana, experts have testified in the case, with Black voters preferring Democratic candidates. Democrats are likely to add another district in Alabama. There are also political implications for control of the US House, where Republicans currently have a 222-212 advantage (there is currently one vacancy in a Democratic district in Rhode Island).
“The supreme court once again affirmed the power of the Voting Rights Act to prevent racially discriminatory redistricting, this time in Louisiana,” said Abha Khanna, a lawyer representing some of the challengers in the case.
“Black voters in Louisiana have suffered one election under a congressional map that unlawfully dilutes their political influence. Thankfully, Louisiana is now on track to add an additional minority opportunity district in time for 2024, ensuring that Black Louisianans are finally afforded fair representation in the state’s congressional delegation.”
The supreme court on Monday said the case would be reviewed “in the ordinary course and in advance of the 2024 congressional elections in Louisiana”. That time is significant because the supreme court and other federal courts have allowed discriminatory election rules to go into effect if striking them down would upset the status quo too close to an election.
But the state could still try to delay the proceedings as long as possible, said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“It is by no means certain that Louisiana will get a second Black majority congressional district by the 2024 elections,” he wrote in an email. “The fifth circuit could reverse on the merits or issue some off the wall holding that private plaintiffs cannot sue under the [Voting Rights] Act (that’s something the supreme court did not address in Milligan). Or Louisiana could try to drag things out and then claim under Purcell that we are too close to the election.
“Either way, I expect that the supreme court is going to be asked to weigh in again before any new districts in Louisiana are finalized.”
The court’s decision on Monday should raise more scrutiny over why it intervened last year and allowed Louisiana to use a congressional map that was likely illegal, Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas who has written extensively about the supreme court’s use of emergency orders, told CNN.
“It doesn’t explain why the court nevertheless had issued emergency relief to allow Louisiana to use its unlawful maps during the 2022 midterm cycle,” he told the network. “It puts the court’s interventions last year into ever-sharper perspective.”
