LISTEN LIVE: SCOTUS hears the issue of redistricting that could reduce the representation of Black voters

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican attack on a key provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to protect racial minorities reaches the Supreme Court this week, more than a decade after justices struck down another pillar of the 60-year-old law.

The hearing is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, October 15 at 10 a.m. ET. Watch in the player above.

In arguments Wednesday, lawyers for Louisiana and the Trump administration will try to convince the justices to erase the state’s majority-Black 2nd Congressional District and make it more difficult, if not impossible, to take race into account in redistricting.

“Redistricting based on race is fundamentally inconsistent with our Constitution,” Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Morrill wrote in the state Supreme Court filing.

The mid-decade battle over congressional redistricting is already playing out across the country, after President Donald Trump began urging Texas and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines to make it easier for the GOP to gain its narrow majority in the House. A ruling in favor of Louisiana could intensify this effort and extend to the state’s legislative and local departments.

The conservative-dominated court, which just two years ago ended affirmative action in college admissions, could be receptive. At the heart of the legal battle is Chief Justice John Roberts, who has long had his sights on the landmark civil rights law, from his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department to his current job.

“It is a sordid business, and one that divides us by race,” Roberts wrote in a dissenting opinion in 2006 in his first major voting rights case as chief justice.

In 2013, Roberts wrote for the majority to overturn the landmark law’s requirement that states and local governments with a history of discrimination, mostly in the South, obtain approval before making any election-related changes.

“Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is overblown, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to address this problem is consistent with current conditions,” Roberts wrote.

The appealed ruling depends on the current circumstances

Challenges under the provision known as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act must be able to show the current racially polarized vote and the inability of minorities to elect candidates of their choice, among other factors.

“Race continues to be a big factor in current voting patterns in Louisiana,” said Sarah Brannon, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project. “This is true in many places in the country.”

The Louisiana case only reached this point after black voters and civil rights groups sued and won lower court rulings that invalidated the first congressional map drawn by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature after the 2020 census. That map created just one majority black district among six House seats in a state that is one-third black.

Louisiana appealed to the Supreme Court but ultimately added a second majority-Black district after the justices’ 5-4 ruling in 2023 found a potential violation of the Voting Rights Act in a similar case over Alabama’s congressional map.

Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined their three more liberal colleagues in the Alabama result. Roberts rejected what he described as “Alabama’s attempt to rewrite Section II jurisprudence all over again.”
That may have settled matters, but a group of white voters complained that race, not politics, was the dominant factor driving Louisiana’s new map. A three-judge court agreed, bringing the current case to the Supreme Court.

Instead of deciding the case in June, the justices asked the parties to answer a potentially big question: “Whether the state’s intentional creation of a majority-minority second congressional district constitutes a violation of the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

The amendments, adopted in the wake of the Civil War, were intended to achieve political equality for black Americans and give Congress the authority to take all necessary steps. Nearly a century later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, called the crown jewel of the civil rights era, finally putting an end to ongoing efforts to prevent blacks from voting in the former Confederate states.

A second round of arguments is rare in the Supreme Court

The call for new arguments sometimes portends a major change by the Supreme Court. Citizens United’s 2010 decision, which led to significant increases in independent spending in US elections, came after the decision had been debated for a second time.

“I feel like it’s kind of like Citizens United, if you remember the way Citizens United evolved, it was initially a narrow challenge to the First Amendment,” said Donald Verrilli, who served as chief Supreme Court lawyer in the Obama administration and defended the Voting Rights Act in a 2013 case.
Among the possible outcomes in the Louisiana case is one in which the majority holds that the need for courts to intervene in redistricting cases, absent intentional discrimination, has essentially expired, Verrilli said. Kavanaugh briefly raised the issue two years ago.

The Supreme Court separately washed its hands of claims of partisan gerrymandering, in a 2019 opinion that Roberts also wrote. Limiting or eliminating most racial discrimination claims in federal courts would give state legislatures broad latitude to draw districts, subject only to state constitutional boundaries.

Changing just one vote on the Alabama case would flip the outcome.

As new arguments were called for, Louisiana changed its position and no longer defended its map.
The Trump administration joined Louisiana. The Justice Department has previously defended the Voting Rights Act under administrations of both major political parties.

Rep. Cleo Fields has been here before

For four years in the 1990s, Louisiana had a majority-black second district until the courts invalidated it because it relied too heavily on race. Fields, then a rising star in state Democratic politics, won reelection twice. He did not run again when a new map was drawn up and returned it to a single majority-black district in the state.

Fields is one of two black Democrats who won election to Congress last year in newly drawn districts in Alabama and Louisiana.

He again represents the challenging district, which Roberts described in March as “a snake stretching from one end of the state to the other,” picking up black residents along the way.

If that’s the case, civil rights attorney Stuart Naifeh told Roberts, it’s because of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the continuing lack of economic opportunities for Louisiana’s black population.

A previous court ruling that struck down federal review of potentially discriminatory voting laws left few options to protect racial minorities, making preserving Section 2 even more important, Fields said.

They would never have won election to Congress, he said, “if not for the Voting Rights Act and the creation of majority-minority districts.”

Associated Press writer Gary Fields contributed to this report.