Louisiana Wants To Gut Voting Rights Act

Louisiana Republicans are, once again, fighting for their right to racially gerrymander their voting maps and claiming that any attempt to bar them from doing so is actually the act that is racially discriminatory. Only this time, they’re asking the Supreme Court to overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in order to solidify their right to demonstrate the reality of systemic racism.

From Politico:

In a legal brief filed Wednesday, the state urged the court to overturn a landmark 1986 ruling that established a legal test for when a voting map illegally dilutes minorities’ voter power. That ruling, Thornburg v. Gingles, has been understood for decades to require that states with significant communities of minority voters draw districts that fairly reflect their voting power.

“Race-based redistricting is fundamentally contrary to our Constitution,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, and other state attorneys wrote.

“For decades and in dozens of cases, the States and this Court have tried to make Gingles workable, coherent, predictable, and constitutional,” Louisiana wrote. “Louisiana’s experience suggests that Gingles cannot be reformed and should be overruled.”

For the record, the Louisiana GOP is asking the court to do away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which broadly prohibits discriminatory election practices based on race, color, or language minority status and paved the way for the drawing of “majority-minority districts,” which, as Politico put it, “are meant to give Black, Latino or Asian voters a meaningful ability to elect candidates of their choosing.” What state Republicans are arguing is that such “race-based redistricting” is unconstitutional because it “violates fundamental equal protection principles.”

“The invidious classifications underlying race-based redistricting present the last significant battle in defense of our ‘color blind’ Constitution,” Louisiana wrote in its legal brief.

And there it is…

Whenever you hear conservatives talk about “colorblindness” in America, they’re just pretending America was never a racist country, meaning there was never a reason to correct historic racism that has negatively impacted current racial progress. Not only that, but they are insisting that any attempt to correct historic racism is actually discriminatory against the white majority.

Let’s get into a little background on how long and hard Louisiana Republicans have been fighting the courts in an effort to continue diluting Black and Latino voting power under the guise of colorblindness. In January 2024,  the Louisiana Senate passed a new congressional map that would create a second majority-Black voting district in the state, which is about 32% Black. This decision, which had bipartisan support at the time, came after it was determined that the previously existing voting map, established in 2022, intentionally reduced Black voting power.

In their recent legal brief, state leaders argued they were “coerced” by federal courts to, well, make their maps less racist to fall in line with the Voting Rights Act. State Republicans are arguing now what they argued last year: that establishing majority-Black voter districts to correct the intentional anti-Black voter racism of previous maps is itself a violation of laws prohibiting racist voting maps.

In fact, they’re arguing that correcting racist voting maps represents a violation of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which was the 2023 ruling that led to the gutting of affirmative action, specifically in college admissions, although Republicans and white nationalist interest groups (not that there’s really much of a difference there) immediately moved to apply it to any institution they perceive as practicing affirmative action or DEI.

White nationalist conservatives have long argued that addressing racism is the real racism; now they’re working to enshrine that white and fragile narrative into constitutional law.

Louisiana Republicans’ latest bid to redefine racial discrimination to benefit white interests will be argued at the Supreme Court on Oct. 15, and a decision on the matter is expected to be made by June 2026.

SEE ALSO:

Eric Holder Strategizes Against Gerrymandering With House Democrats

Op-Ed: The Texas GOP’s Gerrymandering Plan Is Rooted In Racism

Louisiana GOP Wants Supreme Court To Repeal Provision In Voting Rights Act That Prohibits Racial Gerrymandering  was originally published on newsone.com