The Supreme Court justices appeared divided after the first day of arguments over Louisiana’s Congressional maps with two majority-Black districts, Louisiana Illuminator reports.
Conservative judges suggested they may throw out the map drawn last year and make it more difficult for lawsuits to be brought under the Voting Rights Act, which allows voters to sue over possible infringements of their voting rights.
Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund were among the defender’s of Louisiana’s current map. Anguiñaga and Stuart Naifeh with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, say politics, not race, drove the creation of the current map.
“In an election year, we faced the prospect of a federal-court drawn map that placed in jeopardy the Speaker of the House, the House Majority Leader and our representative on the Appropriations Committee,” Anguiãga told the justices. “And so in light of those facts, we made the politically rational decision.”
In contrast, Edward Greim, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, argued on Monday that race was the predominant factor in the state’s actions, not politics. The white voters who brought the suit reside in the 6th District.
“The state admits in its briefing the baseline was to draw a second Black majority district. Everything else that happened flowed from that,” Greim says.
