The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s redrawn Congressional map violated the Constitution.
“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not allow “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified in Section 4(f)(2) of the Act.”
In other words, the Voting Rights Act protects everyone’s right to vote. Majority, minority, Republican, Democrat, male, or female. No one gets a preference. Not a single person.
The Fifteenth Amendment states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The majority point out precedents set from past cases:
The Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny. The Court’s precedents have identified “only two compelling interests” that can satisfy strict scrutiny: “avoiding imminent and serious risks to human safety in prisons,” and “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U. S. 181. The question presented is whether compliance with §2 of the Voting Rights Act should be added to this very short list of compelling interests. The Court now holds that compliance with §2, as properly construed, can provide such an interest. A proper interpretation of §2 requires examining the statutory text to understand what it demands with respect to drawing legislative districts.
Louisiana created a second majority-district map after the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ruled that only one majority-black district violated the Voting Rights Act.
A group that calls itself “non-African American” voters challenged the ruling, arguing the new map violates the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana agreed, ruling that the state’s use of race as a primary consideration violated the Constitution.
Louisiana insisted the group could not challenge the ruling because it could not prove harm.
The decision is interesting because SCOTUS refused an emergency request to stop the redrawn California Congressional map.
The California Republican Party sued Gov. Gavin Newsom over the map in the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.
California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop 50, which will allow the Democrat-led legislature to redraw five Congressional districts.
The districts will flip to Democrats.
The coalition claims Prop 50 is unconstitutional.
“Specifically, the California Legislature violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution when it drew new congressional district lines based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it,” they argued.
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