Oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais will be heard by the Supreme Court next Monday. The court’s decision on the combined case may have ramifications for the proper interpretation of the Voting Rights Act and the fate of Alabama’s court-mandated district map.
Louisiana, like Alabama, only had one Black majority Congressional district until a federal court ruled the maps proposed by the state legislature following the 2020 census were racial gerrymanders. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan, the Louisiana legislature eventually adopted a new map with two Black majority districts.
Piper Hutchinson reported for the Louisiana Illuminator that the state legislature’s second district map was primarily drawn in order to offer up Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana, as a “sacrificial lamb” while keeping the other Republicans in the state’s Congressional delegation in safe seats.
The 12 “non-African American voter[s]” who filed Louisiana v. Callais allege in their complaint that by creating two Black majority districts, the Louisiana legislature “engaged in textbook racial gerrymandering and violated the U.S. Constitution.”
In a 2-1 decision early last year, a district court sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that Louisiana’s redistricting process violated the Equal Protections clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Now before the Supreme Court, the consolidated case hinges on determining the proper interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ever since a key amendment was added in 1982, Section 2 has traditionally been viewed as broadly prohibiting vote dilution by requiring the creation of majority-minority districts.
Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of Alabama Values, said during a press conference last Friday that this case and fights over proper districting are “about people power.”
“Having the right to vote is not not enough if that vote does not translate to real power,” Hardy said. “One thing that we’ve learned, that the Census data has shown us, is that our country is becoming more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, political ideology and yet what we are witnessing right now is an all-out attempt to concentrate power in the hands of a few at the expense and subjugation of Black voters in Louisiana and in other states.”
The director of the Louisiana ACLU, Alana Odoms, forecast that if Section 2 is weakened, it “could create a cascade effect where once again, states around the nation would start being quite nefarious in the way that they are doing their redistricting processes.”
States could be “completely ignoring the census, completely ignoring population changes suggesting that the country is becoming blacker and browner, and continuing to try to maintain districts that largely elect candidates of choice for white voters,” she explained.
Unsurprisingly given Alabama’s stance in Allen v. Milligan and other redistricting cases, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has led a coalition of states arguing that if the Voting Rights Act still requires majority-minority districts, it likely violates the 15th Amendment.
Marshall filed an amicus brief in September on behalf of Alabama and 12 other states. The brief criticizes the court system’s “endlessly malleable approach to [Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965]” and complains it “cannot justify race-based remedies and will demand race-based redistricting in perpetuity.”
“Evidence that black Louisianans have less opportunity to participate in the political process is absent from the record, as the Robinson district court expressly acknowledged,” one section of the brief claims. “Still, the court held that §2 requires Louisiana to sort voters by race. That betrays an atextual and standardless approach to §2 that this Court should squarely reject in this appeal.”
Another part affirms that the states who filed the brief “sympathize with Louisiana, whose saga proves how impossible it has become, now almost sixty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, to comply simultaneously with our color-blind Constitution and increasingly expansive interpretations of Section 2.”
In its ruling on Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court considered and rejected a similar argument that Section 2 of the VRA violated the 15th Amendment by referring to the court’s past decisions. “In light of that precedent, including City of Rome, we are not persuaded by Alabama’s arguments that §2 as interpreted in Gingles exceeds the remedial authority of Congress,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
After oral arguments are heard next week, it will likely be several months until the court’s decision is released before the end of the session in late June.
