WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court paused the latest fight over Louisiana’s congressional district maps on Wednesday, allowing the state in the 2024 election to use a newly constructed map that creates a second majority-Black district.
Louisiana and civil rights groups asked the justices to block a lower court ruling finding that the state’s 2024 maps were unconstitutional. The state said it needed to decide what map to use in the upcoming election by May 15, leaving little time to litigate claims of racial gerrymandering.
The high court agreed to the pause. The majority did not provide an explanation for its ruling but said the stay will remain until the litigation is fully resolved.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, both Barack Obama appointees, said publicly that they would deny the application to stay.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, dissented from the order.
She said scrutiny of Louisiana’s congressional maps is fitting because the nation’s commitment to racial equality when electing representatives is one of the most consequential questions in a democracy — but this application didn’t address it.
“The question before us today, though, is far more quotidian: When does Louisiana need a new map for the November 2024 election?” Jackson wrote.
The court previously denied stay applications on redistricting orders as close or closer to an election than Louisiana’s case, the justice noted. She rejected the state’s claim that not having a congressional map finalized by May 15 would lead to voter confusion in the November elections.
Jackson said there was still time for the lower courts to act before the justices’ interference would be necessary.
“Rather than wading in now, I would have let the district court’s remedial process run its course before considering whether our emergency intervention was warranted,” Jackson wrote.
Wednesday’s order stems from a previous dispute over the Louisiana Legislature’s 2022 map proposal. Voters and civil rights groups challenged that map as diluting the voters of Black voters. The 2020 census found that Black voters made up over 30% of the voting-age population in Louisiana, but the 2022 map only adopted a single majority-Black district.
A lower court found that the 2022 map violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered the Legislature to add a second majority-Black congressional district. The Supreme Court paused the redraw in June 2022 preventing changes to the map until the justices ruled on a similar dispute out of Alabama.
Five justices rejected Alabama’s attempt to reshape Section 2 by including a “race-neutral benchmark” in Allen v. Milligan. The ruling meant Louisiana had to resume the redraw of the 2022 maps.
In January, the protracted fight seemed to near an end when the Legislature enacted a Voting Rights Act-compliant congressional map. The 2024 map only survived for a week before another challenge emerged.
Self-described “non-African American” voters claimed the 2024 map violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution because lawmakers used race to create a second majority-Black district.
The state and civil rights groups defended the map, arguing that politics was the main driver. The Sixth Congressional District includes a 250-mile stretch from Shreveport in the northwest to Baton Rouge in the southeast. The 2024 map increased that district’s Black voting age population from 24% to 54%.
A panel of federal judges sided with the non-African American voters, finding that the Sixth District was an impermissible racial gerrymander.
Louisiana asked the Supreme Court to pause the lower court ruling but also suggested that the justices review the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act next year. The justices declined to grant full review on the case in their order but left the door open to do so later.