Yesterday, a three-judge panel in the Western District of Louisiana issued their ruling in the lawsuit surrounding the state’s new congressional redistricting map, which cut Louisiana’s six districts in a way insuring two majority-black districts.
Somewhat surprisingly (but not really), the judges tossed the 4-2 map passed by the state legislature in January on the basis that it’s driven solely by race in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
A panel of three federal judges agreed to throw out the new Louisiana Congressional district map adopted by the Legislature earlier this year.
The case was heard in the Western District of Louisiana. Plaintiffs filed in Monroe earlier this year, and oral arguments were heard in Shreveport. District Judges David C. Joseph and Robert R. Summerhays wrote the majority opinion, and Circuit Judge Carl E. Stewart wrote a lengthy dissent.
In their judgment, they wrote that the map, which was designed to create a second majority-Black district to meet requirements set by federal court order out of the Louisiana Middle District, does not meet Equal Protection Clause requirements. They called the current layout an “impermissible racial gerrymander.”
The current map nearly cuts the 4th district, covering western Louisiana, in half with the 6th district. It’s drawn as a narrow, diagonal arm that runs from northwest Louisiana to Baton Rouge.
The judges wrote, “There is no doubt that District 6 divides some established communities of interest from one another while collecting parts of disparate communities of interest into one voting district.”
They said it “also divides the four largest cities and metropolitan areas in its path along clearly racial lines.”
The ruling, as it stands, means the state can’t use the current map in any future elections.
A representative for the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office said they could not comment at this time.
This is marvelously entertaining stuff, because in hindsight everything about the map and the process by which it was drawn looks like a pro wrestling match or a well-staged fixed horse race.
For example, the record of the deliberations in advance of passage of the 4-2 map makes for an unmistakable commitment to identify that this was all about race.
Plaintiffs argued that the new map was drawn with race as the predominant factor, which is unconstitutional.
“The record includes audio and video recordings, as well as transcripts, of statements made by key political figures such as the Governor of Louisiana, the Louisiana Attorney General, and Louisiana legislators, all of whom expressed that the primary purpose guiding SB8 was to create a second majority-Black district due to the Robinson litigation,” the judges wrote.
State Sen. Glen Womack, who introduced the map that was adopted said, “We all know why we’re here. We were ordered to draw a new Black district, and that’s what I’ve done.”
State Reps. Beau Beaullieu and Josh Carlson also noted race as a determining factor in drawing the new map.
Carlson additionally said that, unlike Alabama, Louisiana lacks concentrated areas with high minority populations. Similar arguments over Alabama voting maps have set precedence in this case.
Joseph and Summerhays determined that a combination of motives led to the disregard of traditional districting principles and the resulting “bizarre” shape of District 6.
While race can be an element of decision-making, it cannot be the main point, the judges wrote, and they determined that race was the deciding factor.
They said a heat map showing the most densely populated areas with minority voters, designed by expert demographer Michael Hefner, showed how the new district was racially gerrymandered.
“In sum, the ‘heat maps’ and demographic data in evidence tell the true story – that race was the predominate factor driving decisions made by the State in drawing the contours of District 6. This evidence shows that the unusual shape of the district reflects an effort to incorporate as much of the dispersed Black population as was necessary to create a majority-Black district,” they wrote.
Let’s remember, that map was the one Gov. Jeff Landry insisted on.
Landry made a point of arguing that the 4-2 map, which essentially gave away a congressional seat to the Democrats (principally Cleo Fields, who held the old racially gerrymandered 8th District seat back in the 1990’s before it was similarly thrown out by the courts) at the expense of incumbent Republican Garret Graves, who made the mistake of backing Stephen Waguespack instead of Landry last fall, was necessary to pass because the alternative would be worse. Specifically, that federal judge Shelly Dick of the Middle District of Louisiana, who had the case a group of black politicians and activists (and ultimately joined by the Biden Justice Department) filed against the 5-1 map the state legislature drew in 2021, was going to draw her own map and it would be essentially a 3-3 map with two black districts and another district tailored toward electing a white Democrat.
That was enough motivation to get legislators to vote for Landry’s 4-2 map, which for all its eccentricities did make for four exceptionally conservative districts Republicans could never lose – and also it put Graves behind the eight ball, which was exactly where Landry wanted him.
And this was the argument for keeping that 4-2 map – namely, that politics and incumbent protection (or the opposite) were acceptable reasons to draw a congressional map and those were what drove its production.
But Judges Joseph and Summerhays didn’t buy it. What they saw was the obvious – this whole process was begun because of race, and everything flowed out of that poisonous spring.
In other words, this was a not-so-indirect shot at Dick and her insistence on a second black district.
So what happens now? That’s a little up in the air. But what seems pretty obvious at this point is that we’re about to get to the point where Secretary of State Nancy Landry announces that she doesn’t think her office has enough time to run congressional elections using any map other than the “current” 2021 map. And that’ll mean a 5-1 map from which all the current incumbents will run and win easily.
Which begs the question whether this wasn’t the plan all along, with a giant pantomime playing out at the legislature, in the media and in court to frustrate the Left’s efforts to steal a congressional seat in Louisiana this fall.
If in fact this has been 3D chess by Jeff Landry, color us impressed. We suspected an element of that was at play, but nobody ever confirmed any of it. And Landry at least put on a pretty good show of touting as the best option that map those judges up in Shreveport just tossed.
And it might not work. Dick might yet draw her own map and it might be a defensible 4-2 map. She might do it quickly enough that it can be used this fall. And the Fifth Circuit might back her up.
That isn’t what we expect, but it’s possible.
And of course, once we get past this fall, who knows what could happen? If there’s a Trump Justice Department, instead of a Biden Justice Department, by late January then it’ll greatly affect whether any new attempts to challenge a 5-1 map can succeed.
Of course, overlying this is that Supreme Court decision in a similar Alabama case, which held that Alabama couldn’t produce a 6-1 map when 28 percent of its population is black. That case was Dick’s justification for trying to throw out Louisiana’s current map.
But the population distribution in Alabama is different than that of Louisiana. A 5-2 map, with a black district based in Birmingham and another based in Montgomery and Mobile, is very doable and makes sense. A 4-2 map in Louisiana is extremely hard to draw without the districts looking like Rorschach tests, because the state’s black population is concentrated in inner cities each of which is too small for its own congressional district. Louisiana’s one majority-black district as it is has to snake its way from Orleans Parish up the Mississippi into North Baton Rouge to pick up enough black votes to be (1) big enough for a congressional district and (2) hold a black majority. Making another gets you the 6th District in Womack’s map which runs from Baton Rouge all the way to Shreveport.
And that’s likely going to be the argument going forward. Which is the correct one.
We’re almost assuredly not done litigating this subject. For now, though, we can be highly entertained at Landry’s glorious defeat, intentional or otherwise.
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Author: MacAoidh
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