Beau Tremitiere is legal counsel for Protect Democracy.
Voting rights groups have lined up to file amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court in the congressional redistricting case Louisiana v. Callais, urging the court to reject the state attorney general’s current position and uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Groups such as the National Redistricting Foundation (RDF), League of Women Voters and Protect Democracy have filed such amicus briefs in the runup to this fall’s oral arguments in the case. The groups are urging the high court to hold the Voting Right Act provision constitutional and to affirm the legality of Louisiana’s current congressional map, which contains two majority-Black districts as a result of previous federal litigation.
Louisiana has six congressional seats, and because the state’s voting population is about one-third African American, voting rights groups have urged the federal courts to keep the current map in place so as not to diminish the voting power of Black Louisianans.
The litigation seemed to be settled after the state Legislature passed a map with two majority-minority congressional districts and Gov. Jeff Landry signed it into law last year. But the U.S. Supreme Court in June decided it would rehear the Louisiana dispute in October to answer the question of whether the map amounts to a racial gerrymander that is at odds with the 14th or 15th Amendments.
Although the state initially defended the congressional map, a brief submitted to the high court by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill declined to defend the Legislature’s latest map based on the question advanced by the Supreme Court. The Legislature only redrew the map last year because a federal district court barred a previous map with only one majority-minority district and threatened to draw its own map unless lawmakers reconsidered, according to Murrill.
“... The Louisiana Legislature under protest drew the (Senate Bill 8) map to create a second majority-minority district that avoided political harms to Louisiana’s high-profile incumbents,” the attorney general’s brief to the Supreme Court states. “We defended that district because this court’s current precedents permit it, and two federal courts directed it – but we have never backed away from our conviction that race-based redistricting is unconstitutional.”
The RDF’s amicus brief criticizes Louisiana’s change of position and current refusal to defend the congressional map.
“With the state of Louisiana abandoning its defense of the map it enacted, it is all the more important that the court enforce the law and adhere to its own precedent by reinstating Louisiana’s Voting Rights Act-compliant map to protect the voting rights of Black Louisianans,” the amicus brief states.
Beau Tremitiere, the legal counsel for Protect Democracy, agreed that the high court should stand by the Voting Rights Act (VRA) despite Louisiana’s turnaround.
“The whole purpose of Section 2 (of the VRA) is to enforce the Equal Protection Clause and reduce racial discrimination in the political process,” Tremitiere said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “For decades, huge bipartisan majorities in Congress agreed on this obvious point. The state's about-face in the briefing is no reason for the court to abandon precedent and common sense here."
The RDF’s amicus brief contends the plaintiffs who challenged the 2024 congressional map manufactured a false conflict between the constitutional amendments in question and the VRA, which together act to “scrub” racial machinations from the electoral process.
“The Constitution prohibits states from diluting the right to vote on account of race, and Section 2 enforces that prohibition by ensuring it reaches subtle and covert instances of discrimination – that is, the forms of discrimination most likely to be enacted by modern legislatures,” the amicus brief states.