Amy Howe:
So, back in 2022, Louisiana drew a new map after the 2020 census, and Louisiana has six congressional districts and roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black.
And so it had one-majority Black district. So this group of Black voters went to court challenging that, saying it was a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election practices that result in the denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on race.
And so this federal district court threw out the map, agreeing with the Black voters. The conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld that ruling and said, you need to draw a new map, state, or this federal court will do it for you.
And so the Louisiana legislature went back to the drawing board, drew a second map with two majority-Black districts, and then this group of non-African American voters came to court saying that this violated the Constitution because it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. It relied too heavily on race.
So the state and then the Black voters that had challenged the first map both came to the Supreme Court to appeal, and the state says, look, we’re between a rock and a hard place here. We wanted to address this violation of the Voting Rights Act, but we also — once we decided to do that, it was about politics.
We wanted to protect two powerful Republican incumbents in Congress, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and then Julia Letlow, who’s on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.
