Supreme Court puts off ruling on racial lines in Louisiana's congressional map

The Supreme Court said Friday it will wait to rehear cases involving a challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map, putting off until the next term a decision on whether lawmakers were too focused on race when they drew the lines.

In a brief order, the court said it may expand the case to add more questions the court wants briefed before it makes a ruling.

The map, adopted by the state ahead of the 2024 election, carves out two of Louisiana’s six congressional districts as majority Black.

A group of non-Black voters challenged the map, saying lawmakers were too focused on race and violated the Constitution.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in an opinion Friday, expressed sympathy for that argument and said the court should have ruled now rather than waiting.

He said there’s been a long-standing “direct conflict” between Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which pushes states to carve out majority-minority congressional districts, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which he said argues against reducing voters to their race.

“I am hopeful that this court will soon realize that the conflict its [Section 2] jurisprudence has sown with the Constitution is too severe to ignore,” Justice Thomas wrote.

No other justices filed opinions on the matter.

Legislative maps are typically redrawn every 10 years to reflect population changes noted in the country’s decennial census.

Louisiana’s legal battle over its congressional maps has been ongoing for years.

It drew one map after the 2020 census that had just one majority-Black district. That was challenged by civil rights groups that said it minimized Black voter strength.

After Alabama, which had just one majority-Black district out of seven, lost a similar case, Louisiana rewrote its map to add in a second majority-Black district.

Non-Black voters challenged it, but the Supreme Court let that map be used in the 2024 election.