On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision on a Louisiana racial gerrymandering case that much of the country has been waiting on for more than a year. And the decision it handed down couldn’t have been a surprise to anyone following the current Court’s decisions of late.
The case? Louisiana v. Callais, which carries with it an interesting story with a familiar lesson: pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Ever since a successful federal lawsuit in the 1990s, when Louisiana had eight congressional districts, the state has had just one majority-black district in its congressional map. That number went from 7-1 to 6-1 to 5-1 as Louisiana’s population stagnated from the 1990s to the 2000s through the 2010s. But after the 2020 census, when the state’s population rang in at just about one-third black and the state legislature passed a 5-1 congressional map (that being five white Republicans and one black Democrat; it’s exceptionally rare and becoming rarer that a white Democrat can get elected to just about anything not just in Louisiana but anywhere in the Deep South), the NAACP and a collection of like-minded partisan Democrats ran into court alleging that a 5-1 map in a state with a population that is one-third black is a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Section 2 is the part of that law which essentially establishes affirmative action for black Democrat politicians. As interpreted going back decades, it established the idea that racial minorities should be made into majorities where possible within things like congressional districts so that members of those minority groups could win elections.
This has not produced particularly outstanding results.
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