Supreme Court Casts Doubt on Use of Race to Draw Voting Maps (1)

The US Supreme Court’s conservatives suggested they will restrict the creation of majority-Black or Hispanic voting districts in a case that could further undercut a landmark civil rights law and bolster Republican electoral prospects.

In an unusual re-argument Wednesday over Louisiana’s congressional map, key justices expressed support for GOP-led efforts to narrow the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned whether a central aspect of the law was still warranted 60 years after it was passed in response to rampant discrimination against Black voters in the South.

Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh

Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg

“This court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time — sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases — but that they should not be indefinite and should have an endpoint,” Kavanaugh said.

At issue is whether the Constitution permits the intentional creation of heavily minority districts — as the court has previously said is sometimes required under the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 to ensure those voters can elect candidates of their choice. Section 2 outlaws election rules that discriminate on the basis of race.

A decision narrowing the Voting Rights Act would be a boon for Republicans given that the disputed districts tend to vote Democratic. Progressive groups say as many as 19 congressional districts with primarily Black or Hispanic populations are at risk, along with a much larger number of state and local districts.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has twice taken major planks out of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the court nullified a different section that had required many states and cities to get federal preclearance before changing election maps or rules. In 2021, the court established a tough new test for claims that voting rules are discriminatory — a standard so demanding that no lawsuit has met it since.

Liberal Pushback

The court’s three liberals blasted the latest effort to roll back the law. Justice Elena Kagan said the disputed districts are being drawn only after voters have successfully shown that an existing map illegally dilutes the votes of racial minorities.

“That’s the way in which the race-based districting is coming in,” Kagan said. “It’s coming in as a remedy for specific proved discrimination on the state’s part.”

The current clash stems from a years-long fight over the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana, a state with six House seats and a 33% Black population.

A three-judge panel ruled that the Voting Rights Act required a second majority-Black seat. The Republican-controlled legislature then drew a new 6th District, which runs a jagged 250-mile course from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, scooping in heavily Black areas along the way.

The map preserved the districts of key Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, while opening the way for a Democrat to capture the 6th District in the 2024 election.

The map’s approval prompted a different group of voters to sue on the grounds that Louisiana had violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by relying too heavily on race. The voters describe themselves as “non-African Americans.”

A different judicial panel declared the new map unconstitutional, and that case is now before the nation’s highest court. The court was scheduled to rule in the term that ended in late June but, in an unusual move, instead said the justices would hear a second argument to consider the broader constitutional issues.

The Trump administration, Louisiana’s Republican leaders and the suing voters are urging the court to scale back the Voting Rights Act, contending that race-based districts violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

Voters represented by the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund say the Voting Rights Act is more targeted than the challengers portray. The defenders say that under past Supreme Court rulings, a majority-minority district is required only as a remedy to present-day discrimination.

The Supreme Court unexpectedly allowed the continued use of race in drawing district lines in a 2023 Alabama case, with Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the court’s liberals in the majority. But Roberts on Wednesday suggested he was open to reaching a different result in the Louisiana case, saying the 2023 ruling “took the existing precedent as a given.”

That precedent includes a 1986 Supreme Court decision that set up a multipart test for assessing vote-dilution claims and determining whether lines must be redrawn. The ruling applied a 1982 amendment Congress enacted to allow electoral maps to be challenged based on their practical effects and without a showing of intentional discrimination.

In enacting the Voting Rights Act, lawmakers invoked their power under the Constitution’s 15th Amendment, which bars intentional racial discrimination at the polls and gives Congress authority to pass legislation enforcing that provision.

The case is Louisiana v. Callais, 24-109.

(Updates with additional excerpts from arguments.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Elizabeth Wasserman at ewasserman2@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg

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