The Supreme Court cleared a Louisiana congressional map that would create two majority-Black districts for this year’s election, marking a win for civil rights groups and Republican state officials who had asked the justices to stay a lower court’s order blocking the new map.
A three-judge panel had thrown out the newly redrawn map last month, siding with a group of plaintiffs — described in court documents as “non-African American” — who argued that a second majority-Black district discriminates against non-Black voters.
The Supreme Court decision only applies to the 2024 election, however, in order to allow the appeals process to continue as to which map will be used for future elections. The ruling came just in time for state officials, who said they needed a finalized map for 2024 by Wednesday to “avoid chaos and confusion.”
The court’s three liberal-leaning justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing she “would have let the District Court’s remedial process run its course before considering whether our emergency intervention was warranted.” As The Washington Post noted:
Courts generally don’t like to change maps or rules close to an election because they want to avoid confusing voters as well as give election officials the time they need to prepare. But the justices have not spelled out precisely when that principle should be invoked, and Wednesday’s decision showed that its conservatives and liberals differ on the specifics.
The new map, with its two majority-Black districts, may upend the delicate power balance in the U.S. House, where Republicans hold a slim majority.
Roughly one-third of the population in Louisiana is Black. The new map was drawn up after a federal court ruled that the previous map violated the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana state lawmakers in January defied U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and sent the new map through the Legislature.
Civil rights groups and Democrats cheered the Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday. Stuart Naifeh, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which represents Black voters in the case, told the Post that it was “the right outcome for Black voters in the state of Louisiana.”