NEW ORLEANS — A new congressional map that gives Louisiana a second black-majority House district was rejected Tuesday by a panel of three federal judges, fueling new uncertainty about district boundaries as the state prepares for fall congressional elections.
The 2-1 ruling bans the use of a map drawn up in January by the Legislature after a different federal judge blocked a 2022 map. The previous map maintained a single majority-Black district and five majority-white districts, in a state with a population that is about a third black.
“We will of course seek Supreme Court review,” state Attorney General Liz Murrill said on social media. “Case law and litigation surrounding redistricting have made it impossible not to have federal judges drawing maps. It’s not right and they need to fix it.”
Governors Jeff Landry and Murrill supported the new map in a January legislative session after a different federal judge released a map with just one majority-black district.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by former Attorney General Eric Holder, said supporters of the new map will likely seek an emergency order from the Supreme Court to keep the new map in effect while appeals are processed.
U.S. District Judges David Joseph and Robert Summerhays, both appointed to the court by former President Donald Trump, said the latest map violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment because “race was the predominant factor” that drove the its creation.
Justice Carl Stewart disagreed, saying the majority gave too little weight to the political motivations involved in drawing the map.
“The majority of the panel is correct in noting that this is a case with mixed motives,” Stewart wrote. “But to observe that and then make a conclusive determination as to racial predominance is difficult to comprehend.”
The decision means continued uncertainty about what the November election map will look like. Another federal district judge, Shelly Dick of Baton Rouge, ruled that the state likely violates the Federal Voting Rights Act because it divides black voters not included in majority-black District 2 among five other voting districts.
But Tuesday’s decision from the divided federal panel noted that “outside of southeast Louisiana, the state’s black population is scattered.” The majority criticized the new majority-black district, which stretches across the state from Shreveport in the northwest to southeast Louisiana, linking the black populations of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge metropolitan areas.
Joseph and Summerhays said they would not decide on the feasibility of creating a second majority-black district that complies with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
“However, we emphasize that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act never requires that race predominate in the formation of congressional districts, to the detriment of traditional districting principles,” they wrote.
The panel scheduled a status conference for May 6. However, the case before Judge Dick in Baton Rouge is still alive and state election officials say they need to know the district boundaries by May 15. The registration period for Louisiana’s fall elections is mid-July.
The decision gives new hope to Rep. Garret Graves, a white Republican candidate whose district was seriously altered by the new map. And it raises questions for state Sen. Cleo Fields, a Democrat and former member of Congress who has declared he would run in the new district.
Rep. Troy Carter, the only Democrat and only Black member of the state’s current congressional delegation, criticized the decision.
“This is just WRONG,” Carter posted on social platform X on Tuesday night.
The new map maintains safe districts for five incumbents: Carter and four white Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise. It was challenged by 12 self-identified non-African-American voters whose lawsuit claimed the districts amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
Supporters of the new map said that politics, not race, was the main factor driving its creation — and that Landry’s support for it reinforced that argument. The plan put Graves, who supported a Landry opponent in last fall’s gubernatorial race, at a disadvantage.
The Associated Press left a phone message seeking comment with Landry’s office Tuesday night.
The majority in Tuesday’s opinion recognized the argument. “However, given the slim majority that Republicans hold in the United States House of Representatives, even if such personal or intraparty animosity existed or existed, it is difficult to comprehend that Louisiana Republicans would intentionally grant a seat to a Democratic candidate in those elections. bases,” they wrote.
The ruling was the latest development in a protracted legal battle over redistricting, which takes place every 10 years to take into account population changes reflected in census data.
The Republican-dominated Louisiana Legislature drew a new map in 2022 that was favorable to all six current incumbents. So-Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, vetoed the map, but the Republican-majority Legislature overturned it, leading to a court challenge.
In June 2022, Dick issued a preliminary injunction against the map, saying challengers would likely win on their claim that it violated the Voting Rights Act. When the case was appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an unexpected ruling that favored black voters in a congressional redistricting case in Alabama.
Dick supported opponents who said the 2022 map packed a significant number of voters into one district — District 2, which stretches from New Orleans to the Baton Rouge area — while “broken up” the remaining black population, distributing it to others predominantly white districts.
Last November, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the state a January deadline to draw a new congressional district. Landry, who was the state’s attorney general when he was elected to succeed the term-limited Edwards, called a special session to redraw the map, saying the Legislature should do that, not a federal judge.
The new map does not look like the sample maps previously suggested by advocates of a new majority-black district, which would have created a new district largely covering the northeastern part of the state.
Opponents of the latest map filed the lawsuit in the Western District of Louisiana in the federal court system, which is dominated by Republican-appointed judges. Dick was appointed to the federal bench by former President Barack Obama. Stewart, the panel’s dissenter, was appointed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by former President Bill Clinton.
These cases involving constitutional issues and remapping are often assigned to panels of two district judges and one district court judge of appeals.
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Associated Press reporter Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, contributed to this report.
