Federal judges will spend much of this week hearing arguments over whether Louisiana, with a population that’s one-third Black, was improperly given a second Black-majority seat in Congress.
At issue is whether a new congressional map revised under court order was “textbook racial gerrymandering” that “intentionally fixed an explicit racial quota of two African American districts,” as plaintiffs allege.
If the new district lines are used in this year’s elections, Democrats would be all but guaranteed a pickup in the narrowly divided US House because about 90% of Black voters in Louisiana vote Democratic.
The seat most affected is the 6th District, now represented by Republican Rep. Garret Graves. The revised map gives that district a 54% Black voting-age population, up from 24% in the version in place for the 2022 election.
A three-judge federal panel is examining the revised map because plaintiffs are bringing a constitutional challenge that alleges the new lines violate the 14th and 15th Amendments. Republican legislators drew the new map in January after other federal judges said the 2022 map likely violated the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, which bars racially discriminatory election rules.
“This is a collateral attack on the success of Black voters in achieving enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” said Marina Jenkins, the executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
A dozen voters filed suit and asked the court to implement a map with just one Black-majority district. Plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, considered the most conservative of the state’s three judicial districts.
Republican legislators defended the 2022 lines but took the initiative to draw a remedial map instead of relinquishing that duty to federal judge Shelly Dick, a Barack Obama appointee who invalidated the 2022 lines. They said their new map reflected her interpretation of the VRA.
Louisiana sought to “comply with court opinions mandating (under the VRA) the use of race consciousness to implement a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana” and also “maintain its constitutional role in redistricting,” according to a filing from lawyers for state defendants. They also said it’s too close to the election for another map.
The legislature’s revised map maintained the New Orleans-area 2nd District as Black-majority and made the 6th District wind 250 miles from Shreveport southeast to Baton Rouge. President Joe Biden would have carried the revised 6th District by 20 percentage points in the 2020 election — a sharp reversal from Donald Trump’s 34-point win in the current 6th, where Graves was re-elected with 80% of the vote in 2022 and no Democrat competed.
Civil-rights groups who successfully challenged the 2022 map said in legal filings that Republican mapmakers remedied the VRA Section 2 violation and were motivated by politics, not race, and that the plaintiffs’ proposed map with just one Black-majority district violates the VRA.
Graves, who endorsed an opponent of Gov. Jeff Landry (R) in the 2023 election, hasn’t said where he’ll run for re-election if the new map stands.
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry (R), the state’s top election official, said she’ll administer the 2024 elections under the legislature’s map unless otherwise directed by the federal judges. Candidates file in mid-July for an all-party primary on Nov. 5.
Two of the three judges conducting the trial that begins Monday were appointed by Donald Trump and the other by Bill Clinton. In addition to considering the merits of the case, they’ll weigh the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction against the legislature’s 2024 map.
Jenkins called the lawsuit “a very frustrating example of forum shopping.”
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