Louisiana lawmakers are watching the end of the Supreme Court’s term closely for its opinion on a case that will either settle or upend the state’s congressional district map.
The case, Louisiana vs. Callais, revolves around a challenge to the map used in the 2024 elections. It included a new majority-Black district, which a Democrat won during last year’s election cycle.
Republican lawmakers support the current map because it protects their incumbents, including Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise. Democrats like it because it gives them another safely blue district in the red state while strengthening Black voters’ say in elections. The current map has made for an unusual coalition of backers, but now, after years of court battles over their redistricting, lawmakers say they’re just ready for the Supreme Court to settle the matter.
“We don’t need more ambiguity. We need clarity,” Rep. Cleo Fields, the Democrat who won the state’s 6th Congressional District last year, told NOTUS. “Because it’s going to have a ripple effect across the country. Either we’re going to have a Voting Rights Act that’s going to be enforced, or we’re not, and that’s the way I feel about it. But once the Supreme Court rules, it will be final, and we are willing, ready and able to live with it.”
The challenge to this map was brought by 12 Louisiana voters who identified as “non-African American.” They argued that the current map relied too heavily on race in its creation. In their complaint, the voters made the case that state legislators maximized “the voting strength of African American voters by stripping them from their communities in far-flung regions of Louisiana and consolidating them into two districts.”
The land-locked 6th District cuts diagonally from northwest Louisiana to central Louisiana, and includes Baton Rouge and Shreveport.
“The district that we have in place in Louisiana today, race was not the predominant factor,” Fields added. “I mean, it was politics. You can’t take the politics out of politics, unless the Supreme Court is going to take redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures.”
In oral arguments to the Supreme Court, the state acknowledged that the legislature had designed the district to protect the high-profile Republican incumbents.
After the 2020 census, the state proposed a map that only had one majority-Black congressional district, despite the fact that the census had shown Black voters made up a third of the state’s population. Voting rights advocates challenged it under a section of the Voting Rights Act that “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups.”
Different versions of the map wound their way through the courts, but voting rights advocates ultimately prevailed, with the courts weighing in to support the creation of a second majority-Black district that needed to be in place by the 2024 elections.
Rather than continuing litigation and running the risk of having a court design a map that would threaten Johnson, Scalise, and Rep. Julia Letlow, the state accepted the court’s guidance and kicked it back to the legislature to design the map.
“We’re in the business of complying with federal court decisions. And when they told us that we needed to draw a second majority-Black district, that’s what we did,” said Benjamin Aguiñaga, the state’s solicitor general, in oral arguments in March. “It’s an election year. We’re talking about the speaker of the House. No rational state gambles with those high-stakes seats in that situation.”
After Gov. Jeff Landry signed the new legislative map into law, several “non-African American” voters filed the challenge to the current map in district court.
Democratic Rep. Troy Carter, who serves with Fields in the congressional delegation, agreed that the new recent majority-Black district in the state wasn’t created predominantly based on race.
“The creation of the second majority-minority district was not about race,” Carter told NOTUS in a statement. “It was about fairness and compliance with federal law. The current map is the product of bipartisan compromise, legislative action, and judicial review. The Supreme Court has a duty to uphold the integrity of the Voting Rights Act and ensure that Black voices are not silenced through manufactured gerrymandering challenges rooted in bad faith.”
Johnson, Scalise, and Letlow did not answer questions from NOTUS about the case. But other Republicans in the state say they are also paying attention to the outcome. Sen. John Kennedy told NOTUS that the case will “obviously be important” to the state, and that he supports the current map.
“The state has come up with a plan, and we’re defending our plan. And I hope we win,” Kennedy said.
Rep. Clay Higgins praised the state’s executive and legislative branches for “working to comply with the complexities of the existing law.” He told NOTUS that he was only rooting for one outcome: for it to all be “over.”
“I want us to once and for all have a clear advisement from the highest court of our land that this is what must be done,” Higgins said. “And then I expect that to be adhered to by the Louisiana state legislature, and then we move forward.”
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Torrence Banks is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Verite News.