A new congressional map depicting Louisiana Second Majority-Black House District The ruling was rejected by a panel of three federal judges on Tuesday, creating new uncertainty about district boundaries as the state prepares for fall congressional elections.
The 2-1 decision blocks the use of a map drawn up by the Legislature in January after a separate federal judge blocked the 2022 map. The earlier map maintained one state with one black-majority district and five mostly white districts. A population that is nearly one-third black.
“We will certainly seek review from the Supreme Court,” state Attorney General Liz Murrill said on social media. “The jurisprudence and litigation surrounding redistricting has made it impossible for federal judges not to draw maps. This is not right and they need to fix it.”
Gov. Jeff Landry and Murrill supported the new map in the January legislative session, after a different federal judge had rejected a map containing only one mostly black district.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former Attorney General Eric Holder, said supporters of the new map would likely seek an emergency order from the Supreme Court to keep the new map in place while the appeal is processed.
U.S. District Judges David Joseph and Robert Summerhays, both nominated to the bench by former President Donald Trump, said the latest map violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because “race was the dominant factor” leading to its creation. Caused.
Democratic Louisiana Senator Cleo Fields speaks during the swearing-in of the state legislature on January 8, 2024 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Fields had announced his intention to run for Congress in Louisiana’s proposed new congressional district, but on April 30, 2024, a panel of federal judges rejected a new map that would have created Louisiana’s second majority black district. Will give. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, Poole, File)
Justice Carl Stewart dissented, saying that the majority gave little importance to the political motivations involved in creating the map.
“The majority of the panel is correct in saying that this is a mixed-motive case,” Stewart wrote. “But it’s hard to look at this and then later draw any conclusions about racial dominance.”
The ruling means there remains uncertainty over what the November election map will look like. Another federal district judge, Shelley Dick of Baton Rouge, ruled that the state was likely violating the federal Voting Rights Act because it divided black voters not included in majority-Black District 2 among five other congressional districts. Is.
But Tuesday’s decision by a divided federal panel said that “outside of southeast Louisiana, the state’s black population is dispersed.” The majority criticized the new mostly black district, which stretches across the state from Shreveport in northwest to southeast Louisiana, connecting black populations from the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge metro areas.
Joseph and Summerhays said they would not rule on the feasibility of creating a second majority-black district that would comply with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
“However, we emphasize that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not require giving prominence to race in drawing congressional districts at the sacrifice of traditional districting principles,” they wrote.
The panel scheduled a status conference for 6 May. Meanwhile, the case is still alive before Judge Dick in Baton Rouge, and state election officials say they need to know the district’s boundaries by May 15. Louisiana fall elections It is mid-July.
The decision gives new hope to Representative Garrett Graves, a white Republican incumbent, whose district was severely altered by the new map. And it raises questions for state Senator Cleo Fields, a Democrat and former congresswoman who announced she would run in the new district.
Representative Troy Carter, the only Democrat and only Black member of the state’s current congressional delegation, criticized the decision.
“This is simply wrong,” Carter posted on the social platform X on Tuesday evening.
The new map maintains safe districts for five incumbents: Carter and four white Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise. It was challenged by 12 self-described non-African American voters, whose lawsuit said the districts amounted to unconstitutional racial discrimination.
Supporters of the new map said that politics, not race, was the main factor in its creation – and Landry’s support for it bolstered that argument. This plan put Graves, who had supported Landry’s opponent in the governor’s race last fall, at a disadvantage.
The Associated Press left a telephone message seeking comment from Landry’s office Tuesday night.
The majority in Tuesday’s opinion accepted that argument. “However, given the Republicans’ slim majority hold in the United States House of Representatives, even if such personal or intra-party animosity existed or existed, it is difficult to understand why Louisiana Republicans would knowingly elect a Democratic candidate to seat them. Will give Aadhaar,” he wrote.
The decision was the latest development in a long legal battle over redistricting, which occurs every 10 years to account for changes in population reflected in census data.
Louisiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature drew a new map in 2022 that was favorable to all six incumbents. The then government. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, vetoed the map, but the majority-Republican legislature overruled him, leading to a court challenge.
In June 2022, Dick issued an injunction against the map, saying the challengers would likely win their claim that it violated the Voting Rights Act. As the case was appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an unexpected decision that sided with black voters in the congressional redistricting case in Alabama.
Dick sided with the challengers, who said the 2022 map packed a large number of voters into one district — District 2, which stretches from New Orleans to the Baton Rouge area — while squeezing the remaining black population into other mostly Whites are “broken” up by dividing them into districts.
Last November, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the state a January deadline to draw a new congressional district. Landry, who was the state’s attorney general when he was elected to succeed term-limited Edwards, called a special session to redraw the map and said the legislature should do it, rather than a federal judge.
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The new map does not match sample maps previously suggested by supporters of the new majority-Black district, which would create a new district covering largely the northeastern part of the state.
Opponents of the latest map filed their lawsuit in the federal court system. Western District of Louisiana, which is dominated by Republican-appointed judges. Dick was nominated to the federal bench by former President Barack Obama. Stewart, the panel’s dissenter, was nominated to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by former President Bill Clinton.
Such cases involving constitutional issues and remapping are often assigned to a panel of two district judges and an appeals court circuit judge.
