The Supreme Court justices had been quiet for a few weeks. But they just dropped a bombshell.
Because the U.S. Supreme Court’s latest 2024 ruling has taken everyone by surprise.
Over the past few years, there’s been some game-changing rulings being handed down by the Highest Court in the land that was given a complete makeover by the addition of three justices who were nominated by former President Donald Trump.
We’ve seen strong Second Amendment rulings, anti-trust rulings, and much more being addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Who could forget the earth-shattering Dobbs case that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade? Or the recent ruling that Colorado can’t just unilaterally decide to kick former President Donald Trump from their 2024 ballots?
Many of these decisions have been impacted by the addition of three new conservative justices that have handed conservative jurisprudence a greater representation on the High Court bench.
But a new ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court justices on the upcoming election has everyone scratching their heads because it did not result in anything anyone could have predicted as the case made its way to the SCOTUS.
The Supreme Court has halted efforts to redraw Louisiana’s congressional districts for a second time since the last election, allowing a map with two majority-Black districts to stand.
The Supreme Court’s order referenced the principle that federal courts should not require states and localities to change election rules or district boundaries too close to an election. The court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented from the decision. In her solo written dissent, Jackson did not necessarily dispute the outcome but argued that the high court’s intervention was premature. The other two liberal justices did not provide their reasoning.
Louisiana’s prolonged battle over its congressional map is the most prominent unresolved redistricting issue for this November. A series of last-minute redistricting changes across the country has given Republicans a slight advantage, primarily due to a GOP-led redistricting effort in North Carolina that nearly guaranteed a three-seat gain for the party.
In 2022, a federal court determined that the congressional map crafted by Republicans after the 2020 census likely undermined the voting power of Black residents and ordered the creation of a second majority-Black district. The state legislature challenged this ruling, but the Supreme Court intervened to pause the case before the midterm elections. Consequently, during the midterms, only one of Louisiana’s six congressional districts was majority-Black, which resulted in the election of a Democrat. Black residents make up roughly one-third of the state’s population.
Subsequently, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the lower court’s decision, forcing the state to redraw its map to bolster the voting influence of Black residents. Earlier this year, state legislators revised the map to introduce a second majority-Black district by altering the boundaries of the 6th District, represented by Republican Rep. Garret Graves, extending it from northwest Louisiana to East Baton Rouge. This adjustment was met with criticism from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who worried about Republicans losing a seat in his home state, given the party’s already slim majority.
This ruling represents a rare instance in which the conservative justices all voted in favor of upholding the congressional district that was more favorable for the Louisiana Democrats running for office.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that it was clear to him that trying to change the electoral maps in Louisiana this close to an election would be contrary to the fact that “the rules of the raod must be clear and settled in an election year.”
The argument is that it would create too much chaos to undergo another map redraw, therefore the current map that is favorable for the Democrats should stand. Though, this wasn’t the only opinion handed down.
Ketanji Brown Jackson surprised the nation with her vote against interfering in the Louisiana electoral map redraw. In her dissent, she said that there’s actually no issue at all with a redraw taking place this close to the election cycle.
“There is little risk of voter confusion from a new map being imposed this far out from the November election,” the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court bench wrote in her dissenting opinion.
The other two liberal Justices did not write a dissenting opinion but largely agreed with Jackson that there would have been no issue with a redraw taking place at this time.
This was an extremely rare case of all the conservative justices voting in favor of the “Democrat-friendly” position and all of the liberal Justices voting in favor of the “Republican-friendly” position.
No doubt this flies in the face of any supposed corruption that the radical Democrats in Congress have been trying to suggest the Supreme Court is guilty of. Data points like these point to the justices actually having a wide-range of malleability that has allowed for plenty of points of agreement and disagreement, sometimes expected and sometimes not expected.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
