On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph, unsigned order in a pair of redistricting cases from Louisiana, Robinson v. Callais and Landry v. Callais. The Court granted the application for a stay. Justices Sotomayor and Kagan would have denied the application, and Justice Jackson wrote a two-page dissent. Most readers probably assumed that the conservative Supreme Court helped the republican voters, and the progressives Justices would have done the opposite. Not quite. Indeed, this is one of the more confusing emergency docket cases I've seen. The upshot of the case is that there will be two black districts in the 2024 election, both of which will almost certainly go to Democratic candidates. Many press accounts struggled to make sense of this case, and the split. Why would the Court's progressives dissent?
Rick Pildes offered a pithy description of the cases:
Two different federal courts had issued two decisions which left LA with no valid congressional map in place. The first federal court said LA's original map violated the Voting Rights Act; the second federal court said the new map LA enacted to remedy the VRA violation itself violated the Constitution.
Today, the Court stayed that second decision. The effect of that stay is the state's remedial map — which creates 2 VRA districts rather than just the 1 the state had created initially — will be the map LA uses this fall.
