Court punt likely means LA back to two M/M map

Today the U.S. Supreme Court sent the consolidated Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais into overtime. As a result of the Court’s refusal to decide on this case concerning Louisiana’s reapportionment of congressional districts heard earlier this spring, three major implications follow.

The current congressional map is likely to survive through the 2026 election cycle. The Court’s embracement of what has become called the Purcell Principle means that, realistically, unless the Court renders its decision no later than early 2026 Louisiana will end up using its current map that produces two out of six majority-minority districts for the 2026 election cycle. Lawmakers made this more likely in 2024 when they created semi-closed primaries for congressional elections that bumped up the qualifying date from early summer to late winter, just after they scrapped a single M/M district map that a federal district judge had ruled unconstitutional the previous year in favor of the present one, which itself didn’t seem too different from one the Court rejected three decades earlier that profoundly shaped reapportionment jurisprudence which itself is at the crux of the current case.

Next week the Court should release a 2025 Term schedule. If the case doesn’t appear very early on for argumentation, the clock will run out if changes need to be made and even if eventually found defective the current two M/M map will be used, essentially guaranteeing an additional Democrat elected to Congress.

The decision may have an enormous impact nationally and a significant one in the state. Whenever made, should the current map be upheld, that would give the Democrats one more, and most controversially if otherwise the U.S. House of Representatives has exactly the same number of seats to each major party of 217 so decisive, seat. That would give the majority to the Democrats in what may consider an own goal by Louisiana Republicans. The GOP narrowly kept its majority in 2024 even with a flipped Louisiana seat, so to speak; for 2026 so far prognosticators think will be a coin flip.

Plenty of lawyers and legislators believed the previous map ruled defective was defensible and higher courts would have said so. Mainly at the behest of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, the state replaced it instead of fighting for the other, although with a map particularly vulnerable to the charge that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, one which drew upon recent jurisprudence regarding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that, in essence, gave race a privileged position among other reapportionment criteria to justify its validity as the state attempted to follow the latest fashion in reapportionment under threat that otherwise the courts would draw their own version.

If the two M/M map sticks, Landry will take a political hit. And Democrat Rep. Cleo Fields will get to keep his job likely for a number of terms. But if the Court declares it unconstitutional and signal deemphasis of race as a criterion, Landry and the lawmakers he cajoled (some very hesitantly) to swap maps will have helped to instigate a tectonic shift in reapportionment jurisprudence and one that likely will have a lasting impact in boosting GOP fortunes in both Congress and some state legislatures.

Yet as the delay stands, it signals that this jurisprudential upheaval is likely. It’s rare that the Court punts like this. Consider that if the Court wished to stay within the guardrails of current precedent and Constitutional interpretation, it would not be taking more time to follow a familiar path. Something big is in the offing, and heavily favored is the case becoming a vehicle to overturn established (if recent) precedent.

If so, almost certainly it will have had it genesis in the concurrence that Assoc. Justice Brett Kavanaugh attached to the slim majority in the currently operative case decided just a couple of years ago. In it, Kavanaugh questioned whether Section 2 retained currency or whether it was outdated. In essence, Kavanaugh argued that the extraordinary power Congress had to use Sec. 2 as a way of overriding equal protection concerns that permitted a map gerrymandered on the basis of race may have reached the end of its useful life – but that question went unasked, so he didn’t consider that part of the case

That has been reinforced by the lone dissent from the decision to postpone, from Assoc. Justice Clarence Thomas who also dissented in the operative case. His missive declared jurisprudence involving Sec. 2 “broken” and the result of giving it, a statute, equal status with the Constitution was that “whenever a State feasibly can create an additional majority-minority district, it must do so—at least up to the point of racial proportionality—even though the conditions triggering racialized redistricting are utterly divorced from the sort of ‘specific, identified instances of past discrimination’ that this Court demands to justify a race-based remedy” (emphasis in the original).

The hesitation by the Court may be because a majority now is open to Thomas’ logic, exactly because times have changed (which Thomas himself suggested in his previous dissent) and was suggested by the defendants (originally plaintiffs when a panel ruled the two M/M map was unconstitutional). What decades ago in drawing a single M/M map out of six when a third of the population was of a discrete minority conscious of that identity then may have displayed a desire to segregate by race out of racist motives today may represent merely political motives in trying to gain partisan advantage, which the Court has affirmed is a legitimate goal in reapportionment.

Thus, the delay, which apparently will feature a rehearing, seems to come because of the intricacies in working out a jurisprudence that recognizes the new reality that will fundamentally shift application of Sec. 2, if not moot it (a view reluctantly endorsed by backers of many such suits based upon the current interpretation, if not instigators of these). If so, Louisiana will repeat from 31 years ago as a pioneer in reapportionment jurisprudence.