Washington – The Supreme Court expanded on Friday the scope of a redistribution dispute of districts of the Louisiana Congress that has been pending for months ordering new information on a legal issue that could further weaken the Landmark Voting Rights Law.
The court issued an order asking the lawyers to address whether, when trying to comply with the 1965 law that protects the vote rights of minorities, Louisiana violated the 14 and 15 amendments of the Constitution promulgated after the civil war to ensure that black persons were also treated under the law.
If the Court ruled that the State violated the Constitution, it would mean that states cannot cite the need to comply with the Voting Rights Law if they use the breed as a consideration during the map drawing process, as they can today.
Rick Hasen, an electoral law expert at the UCLA Law Faculty, wrote in his electoral law blog that the order “seems to question the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Law.” That provision prohibits voting practices or rules that discriminate against minority groups.
The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is often receptive to the arguments that the Constitution is “colorblind”, which means that no consideration of the breed can be legal even if it is aimed at remedying past discrimination. In 2013, the Court recorded a key provision of the Voting Rights Law in an Alabama case and weakened it even more in a 2021 Arizona case.
The judges heard arguments in the case of Louisiana about more technical and less controversial questions in March and originally expected to issue a decision at the end of June. Even then, the constitutional problem rose great.
The new order did not indicate whether the court will hear another round of arguments before issuing a decision in the case.
The Louisiana map in question, which is currently in force, includes two major black districts for the first time in years.
The complicated case arose from the litigation on a previous map drawn by the state legislature after the 2020 census that included only a black majority district of the six districts of the State. Around a third of the state population is black.
The civil rights groups, including the Legal Defense Fund, won a legal challenge, arguing that the Voting Rights Law required two black majority districts.
But after the new map was drawn, a group of “non -African” self -identified voters led by Phillip Callais and another 11 plaintiffs filed another lawsuit, saying that the last map violated the 14th amendment.
As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Voting Rights Law in a case of redistribution of Congress districts that arises from Alabama. But conservatives raised doubts about whether the key elements of the law should be attacked.
