Increase the State Supreme Court to 9 justices

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist

On Friday, July 1, Louisiana was treated to the curious spectacle of the Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Court suing for the right to run for reelection. Not because John L. Weimer is too old, incapacitated, or corrupt, but because the autumn election for his coastal parishes, District 6 seat is on pause – at least until the legislature fulfills a federal court order to create more Black-majority districts under the Voting Rights Act.

The simple solution is a bipartisan deal to let Weimer run and, upon the same election ballot, move a constitutional amendment to increase the size of the seven member Louisiana Supreme Court to the size as the U.S. Supreme Court – nine members, three of them (rather than the current one) from African-American seats.

The trick is that La. Supreme Court Chief Justice John L. Weimer III stands as the only one of his seven colleagues facing the voters this year. His peers, unsurprisingly, remain silent on the controversy. U.S. District Judge John deGravelles’ May 4 order temporarily stopped the election of all La. Supreme Court judges, yet only he was affected. Elections for the state Supreme Court are staggered with two-year intervals, so the next justice won’t be up for election until 2024. Therefore, none of his fellow justices wish to risk their seats due to a massive shift in district lines now when their own re-elections could be years away. Better to wait it out. Each serves a 10 year term, after all.

Weimer and three sheriffs in his Supreme Court district lawsuit to overturn DeGravelles’ May 4 order came as a result of a 2019 lawsuit filed by the NAACP maintaining that the Supreme Court should add a second Black-majority district in a state where about one-third of the voters are African Americans. (Currently, the Supreme Court’s sole Black-majority district is represented by Justice Piper Griffin.)

Attorney General Jeff Landry has consistently fought to keep the same state Supreme Court boundaries, similar to how Republicans in the state Legislature kept only one Black-majority seat among Louisiana’s six U.S. House districts. At least the overall congressional boundaries were adjusted for population changes in February 2022, though. The legislature has not re-drawn the lines of state Supreme Court districts in over 25 years.

A simple answer to increase African American representation on the high court, protect the current incumbent supreme court justices, maintain the conservative majority which Landry fears losing, and thereby break the “log jam” allowing Weimer on the ballot: Bring two new African-American majority seats into existence, increasing the Louisiana Supreme Court to nine seats – same as the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nine is often thought of as an ideal number, or so conservative advocates of the size of the current United States Supreme Court (like Landry) contend. Moreover, the Louisiana Supreme Court exists as a fundamentally different entity. It’s elected, not appointed; therefore, demographic voter considerations should reign slightly more paramount than in Washington. Any extra expense in creating two more African-American majority seats can be justified in the cause of electoral equity. Under this proposal, expanding the La. Supreme Court from seven to nine would render 1/3 of the court as minority-majority, approximately the same as the population demographics of Louisiana, yet still maintaining the partisan lean of the Caucasian seats, alleviating Republican fears that the conservative political balance of the court would shift.

Obviously, to boost the court to nine justices would require Gov. John Bel Edwards to call for a snap special session of the legislature in the next few weeks. Legislators should not complain about the inconvenience. With the current district boundaries unadjusted for 2.5 decades, populations have shifted massively in the interim. The fact that the Louisiana Legislature demurred from judicial redistricting of the Supremes last February exists as reason enough to call a special session before Labor Day.

Expanding the court would mean amending the 1974 state Constitution, but time remains to put an amendment on the ballot by this November, creating two more minority districts without endangering the fundamental partisan nature of the remaining seats. That action alone would meet the demographic equity standard that DeGravelles set down, allowing Chief Justice Weimer ballot access to run for his current District 6 seat (comprised of the parishes of Assumption, Iberia Lafourche, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Martin, St. Mary, Terrebonne, and a portion of the west bank of Jefferson) in the same November 8 election.

Some future reform action would have been taken, after all. Then if voters were willing to approve a constitutional amendment issued by the legislature on the November ballot, a contingent of African-American contenders could compete for two additional minority districts created in time for the scheduled state elections on November 18, 2023.

This article originally published in the July 11, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.