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CNN
01-08-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Supreme Court tees up Louisiana redistricting case that could undercut Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court signaled Friday that it will take a broader look at a high-profile redistricting fight over Louisiana's congressional map, subtly expanding the scope of an appeal that could weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act. In a brief order, the high court reframed what is at stake in the Louisiana appeal and said it will probe whether a state runs afoul of the Constitution when it seeks to remedy a Voting Rights Act violation. If the court answers affirmatively, it would likely bar a state from adding an additional majority-minority district to ensure that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, described the move on his blog as 'a big, and dangerous, step toward knocking down' a key pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court essentially punted on Louisiana's messy redistricting fight on the last day of its term in June, taking the rare step of holding the appeal for a new set of arguments. At the time, the court said it would provide clarity on exactly which question it wanted the parties in the case to address. Court watchers have been waiting for that clarity for weeks. On Friday, the justices handed down a brief order asking the parties to submit a new round of briefing by early October, when the court's new term will begin. The parties involved in the case will now submit written arguments about whether 'the state's intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.' The Louisiana case is among the most important appeals the court will consider later this year. Election experts said the court's new framing questions whether states may fix Voting Rights Act violations without running up against the Constitution. Section 2 of the VRA requires consideration of voters' race to ensure that congressional and state legislative voting districts are drawn fairly. 'The court is asking for briefing on whether the race-based redistricting sometimes required by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is no longer constitutional in Louisiana – and by implication, in states with similar circumstances' to those in Louisiana, said Richard Pildes, an election law expert at the New York University School of Law. The outcome of the case could have nationwide implications. To begin with, it could affect the shape of the districts – and therefore the electability – of several key GOP leaders in the House who represent Louisiana, including Speaker Mike Johnson. It could also set a standard for how much lawmakers in every state may consider race – if at all – when they redraw the lines every decade. The facts of the Louisiana case demonstrate the issue: At first, a federal court ruled the state likely violated the Voting Rights Act by drawing only one majority Black district out of six. When it tried to fix that problem by drawing a second majority-minority district, another court said it violated the Constitution by relying too much on race to meet the first court's demands. The Voting Rights Act requires that states not dilute the power of minority voters during the once-a-decade redistricting process, such as by 'packing' those voters into one district or 'cracking' neighborhoods up into many districts to spread out their influence. The law was enacted in response to decades of post-Civil War efforts – particularly in the South – to limit the political power of African Americans. And yet the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause demands that a state not draw a map predominantly based on race. If it does, the state must demonstrate that it had a compelling reason to do so and carried out the effort in the narrowest way possible. Because of that inherent tension between the Voting Rights Act and the equal protection clause, the Supreme Court has tended to give states some 'breathing room' in drawing their maps. One of the central questions in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, is exactly how much room state lawmakers should have. Now, the court appears to be preparing to debate whether states should have any breathing room at all. CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic contributed to this report.
CNN
01-08-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Supreme Court tees up Louisiana redistricting case that could undercut Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court signaled Friday that it will take a broader look at a high-profile redistricting fight over Louisiana's congressional map, subtly expanding the scope of an appeal that could weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act. In a brief order, the high court reframed what is at stake in the Louisiana appeal and said it will probe whether a state runs afoul of the Constitution when it seeks to remedy a Voting Rights Act violation. If the court answers affirmatively, it would likely bar a state from adding an additional majority-minority district to ensure that minority voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, described the move on his blog as 'a big, and dangerous, step toward knocking down' a key pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court essentially punted on Louisiana's messy redistricting fight on the last day of its term in June, taking the rare step of holding the appeal for a new set of arguments. At the time, the court said it would provide clarity on exactly which question it wanted the parties in the case to address. Court watchers have been waiting for that clarity for weeks. On Friday, the justices handed down a brief order asking the parties to submit a new round of briefing by early October, when the court's new term will begin. The parties involved in the case will now submit written arguments about whether 'the state's intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.' The Louisiana case is among the most important appeals the court will consider later this year. Election experts said the court's new framing questions whether states may fix Voting Rights Act violations without running up against the Constitution. Section 2 of the VRA requires consideration of voters' race to ensure that congressional and state legislative voting districts are drawn fairly. 'The court is asking for briefing on whether the race-based redistricting sometimes required by Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is no longer constitutional in Louisiana – and by implication, in states with similar circumstances' to those in Louisiana, said Richard Pildes, an election law expert at the New York University School of Law. The outcome of the case could have nationwide implications. To begin with, it could affect the shape of the districts – and therefore the electability – of several key GOP leaders in the House who represent Louisiana, including Speaker Mike Johnson. It could also set a standard for how much lawmakers in every state may consider race – if at all – when they redraw the lines every decade. The facts of the Louisiana case demonstrate the issue: At first, a federal court ruled the state likely violated the Voting Rights Act by drawing only one majority Black district out of six. When it tried to fix that problem by drawing a second majority-minority district, another court said it violated the Constitution by relying too much on race to meet the first court's demands. The Voting Rights Act requires that states not dilute the power of minority voters during the once-a-decade redistricting process, such as by 'packing' those voters into one district or 'cracking' neighborhoods up into many districts to spread out their influence. The law was enacted in response to decades of post-Civil War efforts – particularly in the South – to limit the political power of African Americans. And yet the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause demands that a state not draw a map predominantly based on race. If it does, the state must demonstrate that it had a compelling reason to do so and carried out the effort in the narrowest way possible. Because of that inherent tension between the Voting Rights Act and the equal protection clause, the Supreme Court has tended to give states some 'breathing room' in drawing their maps. One of the central questions in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, is exactly how much room state lawmakers should have. Now, the court appears to be preparing to debate whether states should have any breathing room at all. CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic contributed to this report.
NBC News
01-08-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Supreme Court raises the stakes in a Louisiana redistricting case
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday expanded the scope of a Louisiana congressional redistricting dispute that has been pending for months by ordering new briefing on a legal question that could further weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act. The court issued an order asking the lawyers to address whether, in seeking to comply with the 1965 law that protects minority voting rights, Louisiana violated the Constitution's 14th and 15th Amendments enacted after the Civil War to ensure Black people were treated equally under the law. If the court rules that the state did violate the Constitution, it would mean states cannot cite the need to comply with the Voting Rights Act if they use race as a consideration during the map-drawing process, as they currently can. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the UCLA School of Law. wrote on his Election Law Blog that the order "appears to put the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into question." That provision bars voting practices or rules that discriminate against minority groups. The Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority is often receptive to arguments that the Constitution is 'colorblind,' meaning no consideration of race can ever be lawful even if it is aimed at remedying past discrimination. In 2013, the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in a case from Alabama and further weakened it in a 2021 case from Arizona. The justices heard arguments in the Louisiana case on more technical, less contentious questions in March and was originally expected to issue a ruling by the end of June. Even then, the constitutional issue loomed large. The new order did not indicate whether the court will hear another round of arguments before it issues a ruling in the case. The Louisiana map in question, which is currently in effect, includes two majority Black districts for the first time in years. The complicated case arose from litigation over an earlier map drawn by the state legislature after the 2020 census that included just one Black majority district out of the state's six districts. About a third of the state's population is Black. Civil rights groups, including the Legal Defense Fund, won a legal challenge, arguing that the Voting Rights Act required two majority Black districts. But after the new map was drawn, a group of self-identified 'non-African American' voters led by Phillip Callais and 11 other plaintiffs filed another lawsuit, saying the latest map violated the 14th Amendment. As recently as 2023, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Voting Rights Act in a congressional redistricting case arising from Alabama. But conservatives raised questions about whether key elements of the law should ultimately be struck down.
Los Angeles Times
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Can the courts stop Trump's mass immigration arrests around L.A.? Here is what we know
There have been numerous legal challenges to President Trump's immigration sweeps across California that have led to at least 3,000 arrests. But one lawsuit has the potential to dramatically alter the policy. A coalition of civil rights groups and private attorneys sued the federal government, challenging the cases of three immigrants and two U.S. citizens swept up in chaotic arrests that have sparked widespread protests since early June. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, an appointee of President Biden, temporarily blocked federal agents in the Southland from using racial profiling to carry out immigration arrests after she found sufficient evidence that agents were using race, a person's job or their location, and their language to form 'reasonable suspicion' — the legal standard needed to detain an individual. Frimpong ruled that using race, ethnicity, language, accent, location or employment as a pretext for immigration enforcement is forbidden by the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. The order covers Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. The judge also ordered that all those in custody at a downtown detention facility known as B-18 must be given 24-hour access to lawyers and a confidential phone line. On Monday, the administration asked a federal appeals court to stay the judge's order blocking the roving patrols, allowing it to resume raids across the seven California counties. 'It is untenable for a district judge to single-handedly 'restructure the operations' of federal immigration enforcement,' the appeal argued. 'This judicial takeover cannot be allowed to stand.' Legal experts say it's hard to say just how successful the federal government will be in getting a stay on the temporary order, given the current political climate. 'This is different from a lot of the other kinds of Trump litigation because the law is so clear in the fact finding by the district court,' said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. 'So if you follow basic legal principles, this is a very weak case for the government on appeal, but it's so hard to predict what will happen because everything is so ideological.' In the past, legal scholars say, it would be extremely uncommon for an appeals court to weigh in on such an order. But recent events suggest it's not out of the realm of possibility. Courts have backed Trump's immigration policies in other cases. It's not an easy case for the government, said Ahilan Arulanantham, professor of practice and co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. 'I think one thing which makes this case maybe a little bit harder for the government than some of the other shadow docket cases is it really does affect citizens in an important way,' he said. 'Obviously the immigration agent doesn't know in advance when they come up to somebody whether they're a citizen or a noncitizen or if they're lawfully present or not.' The Frimpong ruling is now on appeal. The plaintiffs argued in their complaint that immigration agents cornered brown-skinned people in Home Depot parking lots, at car washes and at bus stops across Southern California in a show of force without establishing reasonable suspicion that they had violated immigration laws. They allege agents didn't identify themselves, as required under federal law, and made unlawful arrests without warrants. Government lawyers argued in their motion that 'ethnicity can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion in appropriate circumstances — for instance, if agents are acting on a tip that identifies that ethnicity — even if it would not be relevant in other circumstances,' lawyers stated in their motion. Attorneys said in the motion that speaking Spanish, being at a particular location or one's job 'can contribute to reasonable suspicion in at least some circumstances.' Government lawyers said Frimpong's injunction was a first step to placing immigration enforcement under judicial monitorship and was 'indefensible on every level.' They asked the higher court to pause the order while the appeal is heard. The government is also appealing another injunction imposed by a federal judge in the Eastern District of California after Border Patrol agents stopped and arrested dozens of farmworkers and laborers — including a U.S. citizen — during a days-long operation in the Central Valley in January. That case is likely to be heard later this year.
The Hill
26-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
10 years after Obergefell, gay marriage faces growing threats
Same-sex marriage equality has been the law of the land for 10 years as of Thursday. But after a string of crushing losses for LGBTQ rights at the Supreme Court this term and calls for the court to revisit its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges — including from its own justices — those involved in the fight wonder how long their victory may last. 'I certainly never thought that at the 10th anniversary of marriage equality, I'd be worried about making it beyond 10 years,' said lead plaintiff Jim Obergefell. 'Yet, here we are.' Obergefell sued the state of Ohio in 2013 over its refusal to recognize same-sex marriage on death certificates. His late husband, John Arthur James, whom he married in Maryland, died of complications from ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, shortly before litigation began. 'John and I started something that was scary, something that was overwhelming,' he said in a recent interview. 'But it was all for the right reason; we loved each other, and we wanted to exist.' 'We wanted to be seen by our state, and we wanted John to die a married man,' he said. 'And I wanted to be his widower, in every sense of that term.' Two years later, on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 'It truly changed, within the LGBTQ community, the feeling of equality,' said Jason Mitchell Kahn, a New York wedding planner and author of 'We Do: An Inclusive Guide When a Traditional Wedding Won't Cut It.' Since that ruling, same-sex weddings have exploded 'beyond our wildest imagination,' said Kahn, who is gay. 'I grew up never thinking that people like me would get married, and so to now be working in it all the time, it's so special.' Nearly 600,000 same-sex couples in the U.S. have married since, boosting state and local economies by roughly $6 billion and generating an estimated $432 million in sales tax revenue, according to a report released this week by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. 'It has been good for people's families, good for the economy, good for society,' said Mary Bonauto, senior director of civil rights and legal strategies at GLAD Law in Boston. Bonauto, who argued the Obergefell case before the Supreme Court in 2015, said the ruling has been 'transformative for couples and for their families.' 'The legal rights are enormously consequential, whether it's inheritance, family, health insurance, the ability to file your taxes together, Social Security benefits when a spouse passes,' she said. 'Now, people can count on their marriages day to day as they're living their lives, raising their families, planning for their futures, buying homes together, building businesses. This is really so core to people's ability to be part of and function in society.' Public opinion polling shows national support for same-sex marriage at record highs, hovering between 68 and 71 percent. In a May Gallup poll, however, Republican support for marriage equality fell to 41 percent, the lowest in a decade. A survey released this week by a trio of polling firms painted a starkly different picture, with 56 percent of Republican respondents saying they support same-sex marriage. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster whose firm Echelon Insights helped conduct the survey, wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week that 'there is little political passion or momentum on the side of opposition to legal same-sex marriage.' But Anderson cautioned that the 'live and let live' ethos does not extend to the entire LGBTQ community, and 'Republican voters seem to have made a distinction between the 'L.G.B.' and the 'T,'' which stands for transgender. In recent years, the GOP has appeared more amenable to same-sex marriage — the party's 2024 platform scrapped longstanding language that explicitly opposed it — though recent efforts to undermine marriage equality or overturn the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell have been spearheaded by Republicans. In January, Idaho's GOP-dominated House passed a resolution calling for the high court to reconsider its decision, which the justices cannot do unless they are presented with a case. The resolution, which is nonbinding, expresses the legislature's collective opinion that the court's Obergefell ruling 'is an illegitimate overreach' and has caused 'collateral damage to other aspects of our constitutional order that protect liberty, including religious liberty.' Republican lawmakers in at least five other states, including Democratic-controlled Michigan, have issued similar calls to the Supreme Court. None of the resolutions' primary sponsors returned requests for comment or to be interviewed. At an annual meeting in Dallas this month, Southern Baptists similarly voted overwhelmingly to endorse 'laws that affirm marriage between one man and one woman.' The sweeping resolution approved at the gathering of more than 10,000 church representatives says lawmakers have a responsibility to pass legislation reflecting 'the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family' and to oppose proposals that contradict 'what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.' The document calls for overturning laws and court rulings that 'defy God's design for marriage and family,' which includes the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision. Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said the church's resolution is a 'call for moral clarity.' 'At the individual level, we are trying to speak to individual consciences and tell them there's a better way to both think about marriage and participate in marriage than what they're seeing all around them in culture,' Leatherwood said. Some of the Supreme Court's own justices have also voiced concerns about whether the Obergefell decision infringes on religious freedom or misinterprets the Constitution. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, conservatives who dissented from the court's majority opinion in 2015, wrote again in 2020 that the court, in siding with the Obergefell plaintiffs, 'read a right to same-sex marriage into the Fourteenth Amendment, even though that right is found nowhere in the text.' Last winter, in a five-page statement explaining the court's decision not to involve itself in a dispute between the Missouri Department of Corrections and jurors dismissed for disapproving of same-sex marriage on religious grounds, Alito wrote that the conflict 'exemplifies the danger' he anticipated in 2015. 'Namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be 'labeled as bigots and treated as such' by the government,' he wrote. In a concurring opinion to the Supreme Court's 2022 majority ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in which the court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Thomas said the justices 'should reconsider' past decisions codifying rights to same-sex marriage, gay sex and access to contraception — rulings he said were 'demonstrably erroneous.' 'I think there are a number of reasons why people are concerned now, and I don't think that's unreasonable,' said Bonauto, the attorney who argued in favor of marriage equality in 2015. 'I will say, however, that overturning Obergefell would be undeniably awful, and GLAD Law and others of us are going to fight tooth and nail with everything we have to preserve it and, really, we have some confidence that we will win.' In late 2022, in large part because of Thomas's dissent in the court's Dobbs decision, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying protections for same-sex and interracial married couples. The measure also formally repealed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law that recognized marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. The Supreme Court had already ruled a portion of that law unconstitutional in a decision handed down exactly two years before it ruled in Obergefell. 'We know in our nation that everything gets challenged eventually,' said Bonauto. 'But it's an extremely important recognition from the Congress that marriage is just too important to people to have it blink on and off when you cross state lines.' 'The importance of the Respect for Marriage Act should not be understated, right now in particular,' said Naomi Goldberg, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank. 'That bill being passed by Congress really has changed the game.' In more than half of states, statutes or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage remain on the books, though 'zombie laws' against marriage equality are not enforceable because of the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell. The Respect for Marriage Act prevents those measures from being enforced on already-married couples or couples married in states without a ban on same-sex marriage should the court's decision be overturned, a significant shift from the pre-Obergefell landscape, where recognition of marriage depended entirely on zip code. 'When you look at the map of where we were in 2015, and anti-equality laws, it was quite a different country,' said Goldberg. 'Families were making decisions about where to travel; do we need to take a birth certificate or a will with us?' 'The fact that those couples can marry in every place across the country and they can travel safely and not worry about being barred from a hospital room or not be able to make a decision for their child is remarkable,' she added. 'Those really tangible things can get lost when we talk about these big concepts like the Constitution and protections for communities.' Asked about the handful of resolutions asking for the Supreme Court to revisit its Obergefell decision, Goldberg said more meaningful, and legally binding, action has taken place in states looking to bolster protections for same-sex couples. Voters in three progressive states — California, Colorado and Hawaii — passed ballot measures in November that struck language from their constitutions defining marriage as being between one man and one woman. Additional states are hoping to get similar proposals before voters in 2026. 'I firmly believe that it would take a lot for couples in this country to lose the right to marry,' said Goldberg, 'but it doesn't mean that having that language on the books is not symbolic and meaningful to those of us who live in states like that.'
