Supreme Court orders Louisiana to use congressional map with additional Black district in 2024 vote
Supreme Court orders Louisiana to use congressional map with additional Black district in 2024 vote
The Supreme Court has ordered Louisiana to hold congressional elections using a House map with a second mostly Black district, despite a lower-court ruling that called the map an illegal racial gerrymander.
As someone who lives in Louisiana’s 2nd district, the main problem (some) Republicans have with the map wasn’t that a 2nd black district was drawn. It’s that it was drawn so Speaker Johnson and Rep Scalise got even safer seats and they had to screw one Republican Congressman and they chose one to screw.
This isn’t really a fight over civil rights anymore. The Voting Rights Act requires 2 majority black districts in a state with 6 seats and a 33% black population. It’d be easy enough to make two without it being so weirdly drawn but that would have required two members of the Congressional Republican leadership to make their districts competitive and that wasn’t happening.
In fairness, it’s also fucking hard to draw maps in Louisiana. I work with GIS software to create maps sometimes and you basically need at least a gaming desktop to apply high res water layers to maps without your computer getting so hot for so long, it could be used as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator on a mission to the outer solar system.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The order allows the use of a map that has majority Black populations in two of the state’s six congressional districts, potentially boosting Democrats’ chances of gaining control of the closely divided House of Representatives in the 2024 elections.
“When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote two years ago in a similar case from Alabama.
... We will have a map with 2 majority black districts this fall,” Jared Evans, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, wrote in a text using an abbreviation for the Supreme Court.
Edward Greim and Paul Hurd, attorneys for plaintiffs who challenged the new map said Wednesday’s order lets the state impose a “brutal racial gerrymander” on 2024 voters who will cast ballots in districts “segregated by race.” But they predicted eventual victory in the case.
He backed a map that created a new majority Black district stretching across the state, linking parts of the Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge areas.
A different set of plaintiffs, a group of self-described non-African Americans, filed suit in western Louisiana, claiming that the new map was also illegal because it was driven too much by race, in violation of the Constitution.
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The Republicans and black voters are on the same page, and of course the Dems want to change it now
Not sure where you got that from as the article states that the new set of plaintiffs are not black and are claiming that its racist.
From another article: "Nine days later, a group of 12 white voters went to a different federal court, where they argued that S.B.8 is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – that is, it sorted voters based primarily on their race."
Please. By all means, explain where you got "the Dems" from this. Good luck!