If “I’m rubber and you’re glue” were a legal argument, it would look a lot like the one a group of self-identified “non-African American” Louisiana voters are gearing up to make on March 24 at the Supreme Court.
They claim that the state’s congressional redistricting map, drafted after the previous map was struck down by a federal court for unlawfully diluting the votes of the state’s Black voters, also needed to be thrown out because state lawmakers considered — wait for it — race.
The argument worked before a lower court, which threw the newest map out.
But as Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, pointed out, it’s the old legal racial switcheroo. And history is rhyming.
“The argument put forth by the plaintiffs seeking the requirement of race blindness, even in the course of remedying racial vote dilution, is not new,” Jenkins said Wednesday, previewing the March 24 argument to members of the press. “It dates back to the civil rights movement, when opponents of voting rights protections for minority groups used the same argument to oppose addressing racial discrimination. The irony and hypocrisy is hard to miss.”
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee was among the groups that successfully argued that the first map, used in 2022, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A federal court agreed with its argument that the map violated federal law because although a third of Louisianans are Black, only one of the state’s congressional districts had enough Black voters to have an opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court issued a ruling rejecting a similarly racially rigged map in Alabama. So rather than fight, Louisiana lawmakers decided to go back to the map-drawing board and try to comply with the justices’ ruling.
Lawmakers drafted and the governor approved a new map that included two Black “opportunity districts.”
But then the state was sued by the “non-African American” group, which said that the new map was forbidden because state officials drafted it primarily on the basis of race. Yes: They argued that the state violated the law by complying with a ruling that said you can’t racially discriminate against Black people.
Now Louisiana officials are crying uncle, saying they will be damned with Black voter dilution lawsuits if they throw out the new map and damned with racial discrimination lawsuits from non-Afrian American voters if they don’t. They asked the Supreme Court to sort it all out instead.
Here’s the bad news for democracy lovers: The Supreme Court has, for more than a decade, become increasingly critical of the racial components of the Voting Rights Act itself. In 2013, it gutted the law’s crucial preclearance requirement, which required that states with long histories of racial discrimination clear their maps with the Justice Department before they were enacted. In 2021, it made electoral racial discrimination cases much more difficult to bring.
So the non-African Americans must be feeling pretty bullish. They’ll make their case to the justices later this month. I’ll let you know how it goes.
This is an excerpt from The Gavel, a newsletter about the Supreme Court from columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Sign up to get The Gavel in your inbox every Thursday afternoon.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com.