Louisiana had two congressional districts where Black voters could elect the candidate they preferred. The Supreme Court dismantled one in April. On Tuesday, the people who brought that case went back to a federal court in Shreveport and signaled they are not finished: they say the same flaw runs through the 2nd District, the only Black-majority seat the state has left.
A three-judge panel heard arguments on whether Callais v. Landry should stay open at all. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, representing the NAACP Louisiana State Conference, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and nine individual Black voters, asked the court to dismiss it. Lawyers for the state of Louisiana also argued that the case should close.
“The plaintiffs have achieved their success on all of their claims,” Sara Rohani, a Legal Defense Fund attorney, told the panel. She pushed back on efforts to bring new issues into the same proceeding.
The Callais plaintiffs argue that the constitutional problem the Supreme Court found in the 6th District applies to the 2nd, in southeast Louisiana. Their lawyers said they plan to present evidence on Dec. 15 that the district is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, potentially including data from this week’s election.
The stakes are arithmetic. Exactly one month after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Legislature passed a new map that eliminated one of the majority-Black districts. In a state where nearly one in three residents is Black, that leaves one Black-majority seat out of six.
The Legal Defense Fund argues the April decision opened a path for “partisan goals to serve as a smokescreen for outright racism” in redistricting across the country, as the group put it in its account of the hearing. That is the group’s characterization, not a finding of the court.
Nothing decided in Shreveport changes the map for Tuesday’s vote. The Legal Defense Fund said Louisiana saw “incredibly high Black voter turnout” at the start of early voting, and that it led attendees from the hearing to the polls on the last day.
The panel set Dec. 15 as the date for the Callais lawyers to present their evidence against the 2nd District. The judges have not said when they will rule on whether the case continues.
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