WASHINGTON (AP) — supreme court is grappling with a major Republican-led challenge to voting rights lawIt is a landmark bill of the civil rights movement and could water down key provisions of the law that prohibits racial discrimination in redistricting.
On Wednesday, justices are hearing arguments for the second time in a case over Louisiana’s majority-black congressional maps. The state’s ruling could open the door for Congress to redraw congressional maps across the South, potentially boosting Republicans’ electoral prospects by eliminating majority-Black and Latino seats that tend to favor Democrats.
Battle of mid-decade The debate over congressional redistricting has already been unfolding across the country since President Donald Trump began urging Texas and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their boundaries to help Republicans maintain a slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The court’s conservative majority has been skeptical of racial sensitivity, and recently Abolition of affirmative action in university admissions. Twelve years ago, the court struck down another pillar of the landmark voting law, requiring states with a history of racial discrimination to seek approval from the Justice Department or a federal judge before making election-related changes.
Separately, the court has given state legislatures wide leeway to gerrymander for political purposes, subject only to review by the state Supreme Court. If the court were to weaken or invalidate Section 2 of the law, states would no longer be subject to any restrictions on how they draw electoral districts, which would likely lead to extreme gerrymandering based on which political party is in power at the state level.
Just two years ago, the court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a similar case over Alabama’s congressional maps that potentially violated the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh also weighed in on the results, joining three of their more liberal colleagues.
The decision created new districts in both states that would send two more black Democrats to Congress.
But this time, the court asked the parties to answer a fundamental question: “Whether a state’s intentional creation of majority-minority congressional districts violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
In opening arguments in the Louisiana case in March, Roberts expressed skepticism about the second-majority black district that elected Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields last year. Roberts described the district as a “snake” spanning more than 320 miles, connecting parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas.
The legal battle over Louisiana’s congressional districts lasted three years.
The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature drew a new congressional map in 2022, taking into account population changes reflected in the 2020 census. However, this change effectively maintained the status quo in five Republican-leaning majority white districts and one Democratic-leaning majority black district.
Civil rights groups won a lower court ruling that found the district likely discriminated against black voters.
The state ultimately drew new maps to comply with the court ruling and protect influential Republican lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson. But white voters in Louisiana argued in a separate lawsuit that race was the main factor driving it. Three judges agreed, leading to the current High Court case.
