A national criminal board indirectly exposed the confusing clutter that both Congress and the Supreme Court have made of redistricting legislation in its sensible decision to reject Louisiana‘s congressional redistricting plan on Wednesday.
The end result is still messy, but it at least eliminates absurdly dense neighborhoods.
The rear tale is convoluted. The Louisiana court’s unique image after the 2020 population, like the 2010 image that federal courts accepted, contained one area out of six that had a voting people with a black bulk. After 2020, while, District Judge Shelly Dick threw it out, contending that it poorly underrepresented Louisiana’s dark voters, who make up about one- third of the state’s population.
A second black-majority district was then drawn up as the legislature’s revised plan. That district strangely looks like a long, thin, twisted dog’s toy.  , It nearly bisects another district shaped like a rectangular, downward- angling Pac- Man who ca n’t quite close his jaws. The dog’s- toy district stretches some 250 miles, snatching tiny black enclaves along the way. This implies that a black man who resides in a Catholic-Cajun neighborhood in suburban Lafayette shares more with a black man who lives in a rural, Bible-bellied suburb of Baton Rouge or with a black man who lives in a city like his Cajun neighbors. In other states, a parish is equivalent to a county in Louisiana.
A special three-judge review panel today rejected the new map, calling it inadmissibly racial.
For decades, courts have ruled, with good reason, that district shapes should be reasonably compact and contiguous, except to take account of geographical features such as rivers or mountain ranges, and that districts, where possible, should not divide natural” communities of interest” such as common cultural heritage or shared economic bases.
The dog’s- toy district, according to two judges on the panel, violated all of those rules. They said its shape is “awkward and bizarre”, that it shows “uniquely poor compactness”, that its contiguity is “tenuous”, and that economically and culturally its residents ‘ interests “more often conflict than harmonize”. Furthermore,” Nor does]the plan ] take into account natural boundaries such as the Atchafalaya Basin, the Mississippi River, or the Red River”.
The racial composition of the district was repeatedly cited by legislators who wrote this absurdity because they interpreted Dick’s order to be” the predominate factor” or “fundamental tenet” as having been required by law.
Therein lies the problem. Today’s judicial panel wrote that the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment has been rightly interpreted to forbid, in most but not all circumstances, any district lines “grounded predominately in race”. The Supreme Court has argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act should be used to encourage the establishment of districts that give minorities the “opportunity” to choose their” candidates of choice,” which the court essentially refers to as their own race.
In other words, race should be taken into account, but only with a nudge and a wink because it is inappropriate to ignore it, except when shifting coalitions of judges and justices claim that race is a crucial factor after all. However, the courts are at least somewhat in line with the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which state that, on the one hand, voting results by race, called “protected class” is a” circumstance which may be considered,” but also that “nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.
So, race- based proportionality may be valid, but it’s not a right, and by the Equal Protection Clause it is n’t allowed. Go figure.
What Louisiana’s intended purpose is it now? To determine the next steps, the judges have scheduled a hearing for May 6th. Legislators claim there is still time to pass another plan before the session’s deadline. It’s not clear if the court has time or resources to have a” special master” draw a temporary plan for the 2024 elections. The decision from today’s decision may be appealed by those who oppose the plan that was just rejected. A court- drawn plan might catalyze more appeals.
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Because the Supreme Court and Congress both repeatedly send mixed signals, this is the kind of thing that occurs in state after state and redistrict cycle after cycle.
The Supreme Court needs to clarify that racial factors should n’t be taken into account when making redistricting decisions. The Constitution is colorblind. Period.
