Voters sue over La.’s second majority-Black congressional district
5th February 2024 · 0 Comments
By Piper Hutchison
Contributing Writer
(lailluminator.com) — A group of non-Black voters have challenged Louisiana’s new congressional maps, alleging the new majority-Black district violates their rights.
The 12 plaintiffs in the case, Callais v. Landry, contend the map passed and signed into law after a five-day special legislative session at the direction of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and violates the 14th and 15th amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
“The State has engaged in explicit, racial segregation of voters and intentional discrimination against voters based on race,” the lawsuit alleges. “The State has drawn lines between neighbors and divided communities. In most cases, the lines separate African-American and non- African American voters from their communities and assign them to Districts with dominating populations far away.”
The new redistricting plan was enacted in response to an order from U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick, an appointee of President Barack Obama, in the case Robinson v. Landry. She gave the Legislature until Jan. 31 to redraw the lines. A version lawmakers approved in 2022 retained a single majority-Black district, leading to a lawsuit from a group of Black voters to block its boundaries from taking effect.
In December, judges with the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeal denied an appeal from Republican state officials, the defendants in the lawsuit before Dick, to end the case. The U.S. Supreme Court had previously declined to intervene in the matter.
If the Legislature did not draw a new map to comply with the Voting Rights Act, Dick promised to do it herself. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits voting laws or procedures that purposefully discriminate on the basis of race, color or membership in a language minority group. Diluting the voting power of racial minorities is one way the law can be violated.
Central to the new lawsuit is the shape of the new majority-Black district, which runs from Caddo Parish in northwest Louisiana down to East Baton Rouge Parish, crossing the center of the state diagonally to pick up communities of Black voters along the way.
The lawsuit points out that north, central and south Louisiana have their own cultures and concerns, and that the new district does not preserve communities of interest, a primarily redistricting principle.
By ignoring this principle, and forcing Black voters from far-flung communities into the same, sprawling district, the Legislature created an illegal gerrymander that harms both Black and non-Black voters, the plaintiffs say.
During last month’s redistricting special session, lawmakers said they had a different goal in mind.
“Politics drove the map,” Sen. Glen Womack, R-Harrisonburg, author of the congressional redistricting bill, said at the time.
Womack said his primary goal was to provide political protection to U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, and Rep. Julia Letlow, R-Start, the delegation’s sole woman member.
The only way to protect all three members and to comply with Dick’s instructions was to draw the sprawling district, which some referred to as a “slash map.”
The map bears some resemblance to a previous redistricting plan that Louisiana enacted in the 1990s, which also stretched across the state from Caddo to East Baton Rouge. That map was ruled an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in the case Hays v. Louisiana.
“Hays v. Louisiana presents us with what we in Louisiana call a ‘Goose’ case, meaning it is almost factually identical to the case before this Court today,” the plaintiffs argue in the lawsuit.
That district was less compact than the current district and had more tendrils snaking out from the main body to pick up additional Black precincts. Because the newly approved version is more compact, attorneys for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have said the new map was not a racial gerrymandered and a direct comparison with the two-decade old map cannot be made.
Black voters represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said in a January hearing with Dick they intend to accept the Womack plan. Dick can either accept the map or reject it, which would trigger a trial on its merits.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that federal courts cannot review allegations of partisan gerrymandering, as it is a “political question” and outside their jurisdiction.
Plaintiffs in the new lawsuit cited the state’s arguments in Robinson v. Landry, saying it is impossible to create a second majority-Black district without engaging in racial gerrymandering. They also noted Womack’s arguments that he did not consider communities of interest because drawing the “slash map” was the only way to draw to majority Black districts.
A separate congressional redistricting plan was put forward in last month’s session. It was substantially more compact, split fewer parishes and kept more communities of interests together.
But it didn’t meet all of Republicans’ political goals because it turned Letlow’s 5th Congressional District into the new majority-Black district, meaning she would likely not be re-elected.
The new lawsuit will be heard by a three-judge panel, including one 5th Circuit judge and two judges from the Western District of Louisiana, where the new case was filed. The case has the potential to impact adoption of the Womack map before the 2024 congressional elections.
This article originally published in the February 5, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
