Fate of Louisiana congressional districts for fall election up to U.S. Supreme Court

With no legislative path forward, Louisiana officials and Black voters are looking to the U.S. Supreme Court for answers on boundaries for the state’s congressional districts. 

On Tuesday, a panel of three federal judges ordered the Louisiana Legislature to take another stab at drawing the districts, giving them a June 3 deadline that corresponds with the end of the ongoing regular legislative session. 

Lawmakers say complying with that order is not possible, as there is no bill still alive that could be amended to include the new congressional maps. The deadline to file new legislation passed in early April. 

“There’s no instrument that allows us to do it, so we’re just gonna have no option but to sit and wait and see what the judge wants to do,” Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, said in an interview. 

Multiple legislators, including Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, and Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, agree with Henry’s assessment. Beaullieu and Duplessis have been actively involved in the redistricting process. 

That leaves the U.S. Supreme Court to decide what to do. 

Tuesday’s order is the latest update in the case Callais v. Landry, in which a group of non-Black voters sued over the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district. They contend the map, signed into law after a five-day special legislative session convened in January at Gov. Jeff Landry’s direction, constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and violates the 14th and 15th amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

The three-judge panel voted 2-1 in favor of the plaintiffs. The two judges who sided with the plaintiffs are federal court appointees of former President Donald Trump, while the dissenter was a nominee of former President Bill Clinton.

Attorney General Liz Murril, a Republican defending the map passed earlier this year, intends to appeal the court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The plaintiffs in Robinson v. Landry, a court case filed in 2022 that overturned the redistricting plan adopted that year, have already filed an appeal. A federal court ruled the map the legislature adopted in 2022 violated the Voting Rights Act. The map adopted earlier this year was meant to satisfy plaintiffs in the Robinson case. 

“Today, three federal judges who never spent a day running an election have ignored uncontradicted testimony that we need a map by May 15, and once again turned Louisiana’s Congressional elections upside down,” Murill said in a press release. “At a time when concerns about election integrity are higher than ever, this ruling threatens the ability of the Secretary of State to conduct a stable and fair election in a presidential election year in Louisiana. We will be heading this week to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Jared Evans, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that represents the Robinson plaintiffs, said the Supreme Court should act because there is not time for the Callais litigation to play out. Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, a defendant in the Callais case, had said the maps had to be finalized by May 15 in order for new congressional districts to be used in the November election.

The Supreme Court could act immediately or allow the plaintiffs and the district court time to respond to the appeals, Evans said. 

In the Callais case, the judges found that race was the motivating factor for the drawing of the map, which they said made it an illegal racial gerrymander. They rejected the argument that legislators were motivated by politics. Partisan gerrymandering is legal, but racial gerrymandering is not.

A key part of the court’s finding that the map constitutes a racial gerrymander is the shape of the new 6th Congressional 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 Court finds that … District 6 does not satisfy the ‘geographically compact’ and ‘reasonably configured’ Gingles requirement,” the opinion reads.

In their ruling on the Callais case, the panel said it would enact a remedial map if the Legislature did not adopt one by the end of session. If the Supreme Court chooses not to intercede, the panel could adopt its own map. The opinion in the case is silent as to whether it’s feasible to draw two majority Black districts, as the court did in the Robinson case, meaning any remedial map it adopts for the fall election is not guaranteed to have two majority Black districts.

This could lead to further challenges. 

“As long as we remain non-compliant with the Voting Rights Act, there will be litigation,” Duplessis said. “Not having a map with two majority of like districts is not complying with the Voting Rights Act.” 

While plaintiffs in the Robinson case supported the map adopted this year, they preferred several others put forward by Black lawmakers that drew a substantially more compact majority Black district. Republicans opposed this measure because it would likely have led to U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, R-Start, losing her 5th District seat, while U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, would likely be re-elected in the 6th District. 

“This was the governor’s map … this was never our map,” Evans said.

While no lawmaker outwardly said so, Graves was chosen as a sacrificial lamb, perhaps in part because he was widely viewed as insufficiently supportive of Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s failed bid for U.S. House speaker. Graves also endorsed Stephen Waguespack, one of Landry’s opponents in the 2023 gubernatorial election, potentially putting him crosswise with a powerful governor whose interests drove the special session.