In a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court, the state of Louisiana has asked the justices to definitively declare the consideration of race in the redistricting process to be unconstitutional.
“Our Constitution prohibits the sorting of Americans into voting districts based on their skin color — and Louisiana wants no part of that abhorrent system,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a Wednesday statement.
The Pelican State’s request was included in a Wednesday brief responding to an Aug. 1 order from the high court in the case known as Louisiana v. Callais. Centered on Louisiana’s most recent congressional map (S.B. 8), the justices instructed the parties in the case to address the question of whether “the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.”
As The Federalist previously reported, Louisiana’s initial map — which included a single black-majority district — was struck down in the lower federal judiciary over claims that it diluted the voting power of black residents. Continued litigation in the case prompted the state to draw a new map that included a second black-majority district. This resulted in a separate lawsuit being filed against the new map and a different lower court declaring the creation of a second majority-minority district to violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, although the Supreme Court paused this ruling before ultimately agreeing to take up the case in November 2024.
