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A new court filing from Louisiana Republicans seeks to deliver a fatal blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racist gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court is hearing a Louisiana-based case that will determine whether it’s legal to purposefully draw majority-minority districts at all — and Wednesday’s court filing from Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill asks the justices to reject any consideration of race in redistricting.
The filing basically asks the Supreme Court to find the state’s new congressional map — which was redrawn under court order to signal compliance with the Voting Rights Act and has two majority-Black districts out of six total — illegal. In a separate case, a federal appeals court recently upheld a finding that the district maps for the Louisiana Legislature are in violation of the landmark 1965 law on voting.
The filing includes the Orwellian declaration that Louisiana “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination.”
The filing includes the Orwellian declaration that Louisiana “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination.” Essentially, this means Louisiana conservatives want the Supreme Court to unburden their state — and consequently, other states — from having to prevent flagrantly racist attempts to suppress the power of nonwhite voters in the redistricting process.
It’s a gambit designed — as my colleague Jordan Rubin has noted — to strike at the heart at the Voting Rights Act. And this comes after the Trump administration used a similarly dubious justification to pressure Texas Republicans to institute a racist gerrymander in Texas that dilutes Black and Latino voter power.
Between its assortment of avowed bigots and segregation-friendly policies, today’s conservative movement bears a stark resemblance to the one that rose to prominence during the Jim Crow era, bolstered by unmistakably racist policies that disempowered virtually anyone who wasn’t a white conservative. Louisiana’s court filing — and its potential implications for the Voting Rights Act’s protections — risks dragging the U.S. back to that period, to a time when white power could be openly codified through the redistricting process, before a single vote was cast.