Because the Supreme Court just effectively gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act while also giving Republicans nearly 20 more seats in the House for ALL future elections. Just this morning, the high court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines to strike down Louisiana’s congressional map, arguing that it amounted to an illegal racial gerrymander.
Right, and this case first started back in 2022, when Black voters and civil rights groups sued Louisiana over a post-2020 Census voting map that had only outlined one majority-Black district, despite the fact that one-third of the state’s population is Black. And specifically, the groups argued that the map violated Section 2 of the historic Voting Rights Act, which bans gerrymandering that undermines the power of minority voters.
And there are two ways that racial gerrymandering is done: either by 1) concentrating targeted voters so they compose the majority in just one district, when really it should be two.
Or 2) dividing up large groups of minority voters among multiple districts to prevent them from having a majority of the vote in any single boundary. But this also requires states to be very careful when drawing maps — right, they need to consider race to a certain degree in order to ensure that minority voters have a say in electing the candidates of their choosing.
But maps that are drawn too explicitly along racial lines violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting.
And, until today, courts have used Section 2 to strike down district maps that weaken minority voting power — even without proof that the maps were intentionally designed to discriminate against minority groups.
That has been the going standard for four decades, and so, under that logic, a federal court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Louisiana and ordered the state legislature to draw a new map that added a second majority-Black congressional district. And, as a result, lawmakers created a map that allowed voters to elect Rep. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, to flip the new district.
But, at the same time, the Republican-controlled legislature drew the district lines in a really janky way — in part so it could create the majority-Black district while still protecting the seats of key Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.