Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill
Legal precedents that forced Louisiana to redraw its congressional boundaries to include a second majority-minority district run counter to the basic tenets of the Constitution, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Murrill’s brief is a response to the high court’s decision to hear new arguments on Oct. 15 in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, in which “non-African American voters” challenged the current Louisiana congressional map signed into law last year by Gov. Jeff Landry as an illegal “racial gerrymander.” The Supreme Court asked parties in the case to respond to the question, “Could a state violate the 14th or 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution when it draws election maps to comply with the Voting Rights Act?”
The question goes to the heart of the legal debates over different iterations of the Louisiana congressional map after the 2020 census. Since then, the state tried to steer a path that didn’t violate either the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause or section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The latter bars states from diluting the voting power of minority communities.
In 2021, the Louisiana Legislature put forth a map with only one Black-majority congressional district out of a total of six. Ultimately, two panels of the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that configuration failed to adhere to the Voting Rights Act, since Blacks make up about one-third of Louisiana’s voters and yet their voting strength in electing members of Congress was only about 17%.
Both Landry and the Legislature sought to avoid having court-drawn congressional districts last year by approving a map with two Black-minority districts.
“...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,” Murrill said in her brief. “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 attorney general sees a central question in the court’s call for a re-argument: Is race-based redistricting unconstitutional? “It is,” Murrill states in the brief. “We thus decline to defend SB 8 on that question presented.”
Applying racial classifications to determine the shape of key voting districts is uniquely odious, she said.
“They harm voters of all races whose skin colors determine their voting districts,” Murrill said in the brief. “They harm the sovereign states that perennially suffer the indignity of discriminating against their citizens on the basis of race – and then the indignity of being sued for considering race too much or too little.”
She called the Supreme Court’s precedents that forced Louisiana to add a new majority-minority district “backwards.”
“But I am grateful that the court has now asked the parties to brief whether this entire system is constitutional,” Murrill said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “My answer: It is not. Our Constitution sees neither Black voters nor white voters; it sees only American voters."
Supporters of the SB 8 map have argued that it was drawn up based on political factors, such as incumbency protection for U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Louisiana Republican congressional representatives, rather than along racial lines.
Murrill said compliance with the Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act cannot trump constitutional principles and that the court’s precedents dealing with vote-dilution have been confusing and unclear.
“... The states desperately need clarity that so far has been absent from this court’s redistricting cases,” she said in the brief. “Absent that clarity, nothing will change in the extraordinary expenditure of time, money and resources that the states (and the courts) face after every redistricting cycle.”
