Supreme Court Blocks Rush-Job Demand For LA Redistricting

The AP reported yesterday that an emergency appeal from a Democrat activist group which is suing to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Using the argument that if Louisiana, whose population is about one-third black, doesn’t have one-third of its congressional districts be drawn into a black majority it’s evidence of racial discrimination, the Democrats have thrown the state’s map passed last year into uncertainty. The case currently sits with the Fifth Circuit, which is likely to take its time deciding and might well allow next year’s Congressional elections to take place before ruling on the map. The plaintiffs tried to get the Supremes to speed things up, but to no avail.

The justices declined to overrule a federal appeals court, which last month blocked a district judge’s plan to hold hearings for a new map with a second majority-Black congressional district for use in the 2024 elections.

The appeals court said U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick was moving too fast and must give the state more time to consider a new map.

Civil rights groups had hoped a new map for Louisiana would follow quickly after the Supreme Court rebuffed attempts by Alabama officials to avoid creating a second district where Black voters make up a substantial portion of the electorate.

Dick and judges in Alabama had ruled that congressional maps drawn by Republican-led legislatures after the 2020 census and used in last year’s elections likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diminishing Black voting power.

Louisiana officials have said they won’t take any action until their appeal of Dick’s original ruling is decided. That case is pending before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. No justice publicly dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that she believes Dick can resume the work on new maps while the appeal is pending.

But the state attorney general’s office and Jared Evans, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, both said the judge set a Feb. 5 remedial hearing during a Tuesday status conference.

They said the timing of the hearing could be affected by what the panel of three 5th Circuit judges decides. In June, the high court said in an unsigned order that the case could proceed “in the ordinary course and in advance of the 2024 congressional elections in Louisiana.”

The rumor has it that next year a deal will be cut to turn the 6th Congressional District currently represented by Garret Graves into essentially a 50-50 district, and a very prominent black Democrat politician will switch parties and run against Graves as a Republican. This has a lot less to do with the court case and more to do with anger at Graves over a number of things – a perceived attempt to run Stephen Waguespack against Jeff Landry for governor using PAC money Graves had raised (that PAC money was used to attack Landry, which was not a smart decision), and Graves’ perceived efforts to sabotage Steve Scalise’s bid for Speaker of the House in Washington. Graves already had engendered some grumbling over his demands last year to have a slice of the state’s coast as part of his district, which occasioned a bit of jostling other members of the state’s congressional delegation, and those grumblings have grown louder and louder of late.

Were the rumors to prove true, the redistricting case could end up creating a wedge into the black community for the state GOP, the effective elimination of a political rival for both the governor and the head of the state’s congressional delegation, and a cautionary tale for Democrat activists using race as a tool for partisan advantage.

But it’s early, and it’s still quite possible that the Fifth Circuit will find that Louisiana’s demographics, in which the black population is dispersed much differently than it is in Alabama, make forging a second majority-black district something of an impossibility while preserving other factors like similar communities of interest. In such a case, Graves might be safe after all.