Starting in late 2021, Louisiana state legislators traveled across the state in a “Redistricting Roadshow,” where for months they held town hall presentations about the upcoming redistricting process and heard voters’ concerns about potential new maps.
“People showed up to those roadshows and consistently said that they wanted to see fair maps drawn,” state Sen. Royce Duplessis (D) said. “Everything that I gathered from the roadshows was that people wanted to see a map that was compliant . . . with the Voting Rights Act.”
They didn’t get that. Instead, GOP lawmakers draw congressional maps that were later found by a federal court to have illegally diluted the power of Black voters. That kicked off a winding legal saga that has led to the U.S. Supreme Court, which Monday will hear a bid by conservatives to use the Louisiana case to deal another crippling blow to the Voting Rights Act.
At stake is not only whether Black voters in Louisiana have access to fair representation — but also whether the landmark law, already badly weakened over the last decade-plus, can remain an effective tool to block racial discrimination in the redistricting process.
Louisiana lawmakers redraw state and congressional maps every 10 years based on the latest census data to, in theory, ensure that voters have equitable and fair representation throughout the state. Black voters comprise a third of Louisiana’s population but, since the mid-’90s, only one of the state’s six congressional districts has been a majority Black district.
After the roadshow, the state’s GOP-majority legislature passed a map that ultimately a federal court struck down for discriminating against Black voters, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A new map was drawn with a second majority-Black District to comply with Section 2. That was thanks in part to the U.S. Supreme Court’s pivotal ruling in Allen v. Milligan in 2023 affirming Section 2, but also thanks to the countless voters who advocated for a second majority-Black district district.
“Advocates sent letters and had individual conversations with members of the LLBC,” about the redrawing of the map, according to an amicus brief filed by the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus. “The public arrived at the state house and gave public comment. Members of the LLBC and dozens of advocates braved an ice storm over Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend to encourage legislators to pass a fair map.”
In January 2024, the state finally passed a new map with a second majority-Black district.
“I think the victory there wasn’t just about this specific district,” Peter Robins-Brown, executive director of Louisiana Progress, told Democracy Docket. “It was about showing people they have the power to make change… where your vote and your voice counts and matters.”
But almost immediately after Louisiana’s new map passed, a group identifying themselves as “non-African American voters” sued to stop it, arguing the new majority-Black district created a racial gerrymander, in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments. A federal district court agreed and struck down the new map last April, ordering the legislature to draw a new one.
With the 2024 election fast approaching, the state asked SCOTUS to pause the district court’s ruling and allow Louisiana to keep its new map with two majority-Black districts in place — at least until after the election, when SCOTUS can hear the case and make its decision on the maps.
With the election in the rearview mirror, SCOTUS is set to hear oral argument Monday in two cases — Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais — consolidated into one case concerning Louisiana’s new congressional map.
A dubious legal argument
At the heart of the legal drama is Louisiana’s newly created 6th Congressional District, which stretches from Caddo Parish to East Baton Rouge Parish. The creation of the new 6th district came after courts found that Louisiana’s previous map, with only one majority-Black district, likely violated Section 2 of the VRA.
But in coming up with a new map, the non-Black voters argued that the state created a racial gerrymander because its purpose in drawing the map was to “segregate voters based entirely on their races and create two majority-African American voting districts and four majority non-African American districts, without regard for any traditional redistricting criteria,” their complaint said.
Essentially, the non-Black plaintiffs argued that creating a new map to give Louisiana fair representation with two majority-Black Congressional districts and comply with the VRA, it created a “textbook racial gerrymandering and violated the U.S. Constitution.”
It might sound unusual but Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center, described the argument to Democracy Docket as “sort of a throwback to the original racial gerrymandering cases, which were brought by white voters to challenge Voting Rights Act districts.” Cases like Shaw v. Reno in 1993, where five white voters challenged the state’s creation of two majority-Black districts, alleging an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
If SCOTUS were to rule against Louisiana and overturn their congressional map with two majority-Black districts, it would have a ripple effect in that “it could limit the discretion that states have when complying with the Voting Rights Act,” Li said. “It would sort of assume that every district that’s drawn to be majority Black or majority Latino or whatever should be automatically presumed to be a racial gerrymander unless the state can prove otherwise.”
That would have huge implications for Section 2 of the VRA, which essentially allows people to sue over any discriminatory voting law or map. But Li is skeptical about the notion that SCOTUS is about to completely upend Section 2 with this case.
“I just don’t think this is the case to do that,” Li said. “It’s hard to reconcile that, not only with Allen v. Milligan but Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP racial gerrymander case, which said that the legislature gets the presumption of good faith.”
A fight for fair maps
For Robins-Brown, the fight for fair maps in Louisiana has been going on for the better part of a decade. “I thought it would be something that I spent a few years preparing for,” he said. “Fight the fight in 2020, and then set it aside for a decade. Obviously it has not worked out like that.”
He’s not the only one who’s been fighting for fair maps for a long time.
The LLBC’s amicus brief filed to SCOTUS notes how many of its members “have been fighting for fair representation for their constituents for decades.” When the legislature finally passed its court-ordered map in 2024, the LLBC explained in its brief that it “united communities that are living in poverty, have poor health outcomes, [and] lack of access to economic opportunity and created an opportunity to really center these communities in a way that they have not had the attention in the current districts that they exist within.”
Should Louisiana lose its current congressional map and the newly created Sixth District, hundreds of thousands of Black Louisiana voters would lose fair representation. But it’s not just the potential loss of a congressional vote that Robins-Brown worries about.
“If this gets pulled back, I fear the impact it will have on people on a psychic, emotional level,” he said. “It feels like whatever the SCOTUS ruling is, this is just going to be a sort of an ongoing, non-stop battle.”