Last Friday, a federal appeals court nudged Louisiana toward redrawing its congressional maps to include a second Black-majority district.
Although the new decision in this case, known as Robinson v. Ardoin, does not outright order Louisiana to redraw its maps, the appeals court found no errors in a trial court decision that determined the current maps are a racial gerrymander that violates the federal Voting Rights Act. The case will return to the trial court, albeit on a delayed schedule, which is likely to hand down a final decision requiring Louisiana to actually redraw its maps sometime in 2024.
If you are the sort of person who believes that lower court judges follow the legal rules and precedents handed down to them by Congress and the Supreme Court, then the Robinson decision will not surprise you.
The plaintiffs in this case challenged Louisiana’s congressional maps, which include only one Black-majority district out of six, despite the fact that African Americans make up about one-third of Louisiana’s population. In defending its existing maps, Louisiana largely relied on arguments that closely resembled claims Alabama unsuccessfully made in Allen v. Milligan (2023), a similar redistricting case handed down by the Supreme Court.
Indeed, as the appeals court acknowledges in its Robinson opinion, “most of the arguments the State made here were addressed and rejected by the Supreme Court in Milligan.”
But the decision should surprise anyone who follows how judges actually behave when they encounter a case where the correct legal answer does not align with their partisan preferences. That’s because the new opinion in Robinson was handed down by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court dominated by MAGA stalwarts and other far-right judges who routinely ignore binding Supreme Court precedents to reach results preferred by the Republican Party.
Indeed, just last month, two Fifth Circuit judges handed down a bizarre…
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