The outcome of the case could have an impact on the balance of power in Congress.
The Supreme Court on March 24 grappled with a much-litigated racial gerrymandering case from Louisiana involving two consolidated cases: Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais.
Gerrymandering refers to the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to benefit a particular party or constituency.
Federal courts forced Louisiana to change boundary lines to create a second black-majority congressional district. At the same time, a group of non-minority voters sued, claiming the redistricting constituted race-based discrimination.
After the court-ordered changes, Republicans won four of the state’s six U.S. House districts and Democrats won two in the 2024 elections. After the 2022 elections, Republicans had five seats compared to the Democrats’ single seat.
The outcome of the Supreme Court case could have an impact on the balance of power in the legislative branch. Currently, Republicans maintain a thin majority over Democrats in the U.S. House.
The dispute comes out of a redistricting plan approved by the Republican-controlled Louisiana State Legislature that was paused in June 2022 by Judge Shelly Dick of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana. Dick found the map, which provided for one black-majority congressional district, discriminated against black voters, who constitute nearly one-third of the state’s population.
The judge ordered district lines in the state to move to create a second black-majority district to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
In November 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the Legislature to approve the new map by Jan. 15, 2024. The circuit court ruled that if the Legislature missed the deadline, the district court could move forward with a trial in an effort to finalize the map before the 2024 elections.
That court had set a June 3, 2024, deadline for the map to be revised by the Legislature, failing which it would draft its own map. The state asked that court to stay its injunction pending appeal, but it declined to do so.
Attorneys for Louisiana filed an emergency application with the nation’s highest court on May 10, 2024, asking it to put the panel’s ruling on hold.
The state invoked the so-called Purcell principle, which holds that federal courts ordinarily should not enjoin state election laws close to an election. The principle came out of the Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling in Purcell v. Gonzalez.
The Supreme Court’s order stayed an April 30, 2024, order issued by the panel, which found that the map could not be used in upcoming elections.
The general election went ahead in November 2024 and Rep. Cleo Fields (D-Ga.) was elected in the newly redrawn, elongated district that stretches from Shreveport in the northwest, following the Mississippi and Red Rivers, to the state capital of Baton Rouge.
Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga told the justices that the state was in an unusual position in this case.
“Louisiana would rather not be here,” he said.
The state did not want to be placed on the court’s emergency docket in 2022 and 2024 and “would rather not be caught between two parties with diametrically opposed visions of what our congressional map should look like.”
The state had to act because it faced the “prospect of a federal court[-]drawn map that placed in jeopardy” three high-ranking members of the U.S. House, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), “so in light of those facts, we made the politically rational decision. We drew our own map to protect them,” Aguinaga said.
The Supreme Court allows states “breathing room,” or leeway, to draw their electoral maps, he said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Aguinaga the fact that Louisiana had a “likely [Voting Rights Act] violation is all that was necessary for the state to take the steps that it did. So I just don’t know that we need to even engage in the thought process of what if the court order was wrong?”
Aguinaga replied, “Right.”
Jackson continued, saying, “I mean, it existed. And if it existed, then it seems to me that there is a good reason for Louisiana to have followed it.”
The minority voters’ attorney, Stuart Naifeh, told the justices that the state did what it had to do.
The Supreme Court “has been clear that states have breathing room to take reasonable efforts to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and they may also balance the many other interests that enter the redistricting calculus.”
Louisiana acted appropriately after two federal courts determined on a preliminary basis that the state had probably violated Section 2 by trying to comply with those judicial decisions, he said.
Naifeh said the state used “its authority to protect favored incumbents and unite preferred communities of interest,” as it is entitled to do.
But the panel of federal judges committed legal errors when it ruled the state’s drawing of the extra district was unconstitutional, he said.
“Those errors denied the state the flexibility to make political judgments, balance competing interests, and comply with federal law.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh told Naifeh that courts’ remedial powers in cases involving discrimination are not infinite.
“On equal protection law … the Court’s long said that race-based remedial action must have a logical end point, must be limited in time, must be a temporary matter.”
Jackson said the Supreme Court has never ruled “that race predominates whenever a state draws a district to comply with Section 2,” adding the court “suggested the opposite in Shaw v. Reno,” a 1993 ruling.
Naifeh agreed, saying the court “has expressly said that intentional creation of a majority-minority district does not, on its own, prove racial predominance.”
The non-black voters’ attorney, Edward Greim, told the justices that for years the Supreme Court’s “racial gerrymandering jurisprudence” has been mistaken because it has been based on states creating majority-minority districts for Voting Rights Act compliance “whether it was [Department of Justice] pressure under Section 5 [enforcement provisions] or fear of Section 2 liability.”
Justice Elena Kagan told Greim that Louisiana redrew the map for political, not racial, reasons, and was focused on protecting Republican incumbents.
“I mean, what’s wrong with that? If the State can’t do that, the state has no breathing room,” she said.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case by the end of June.
