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Supreme Court to hear dispute involving Louisiana congressional map that includes two majority-Black districts
Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to take up a long-running redistricting dispute in Louisiana that could determine whether the state maintains a congressional map that includes two majority-Black districts after the 2024 election.
The court’s decision to hear the appeal from a group of Black voters and the state marks at least the third time it will step into the legal battle over voting lines for Louisiana’s U.S. House districts that were drawn after the 2020 Census. The justices will hear arguments next year, with a decision expected by summer 2025.
The most recent congressional map, enacted in January after federal courts rejected earlier voting bounds, remains in place for the upcoming election, as the Supreme Court in May gave the green light for it to be used this cycle.
A three-judge district court panel had blocked the state from using the newly drawn map in any upcoming election after finding it to be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. But the high court put that decision on hold.
The winding fight over Louisiana’s congressional redistricting plan began in 2022, when Republican state lawmakers adopted a map consisting of five majority-White House districts and one majority-Black district even though roughly one-third of the state’s population is Black.
Black voters and civil rights groups successfully challenged the plan’s legality, arguing it diluted the voting strength of minority residents in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Agreeing with the challengers, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick blocked Louisiana from using the lines drawn in 2022 in any elections and gave state lawmakers the opportunity to draw a new map that included an additional majority-Black congressional district.
While the litigation was underway, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Louisiana to proceed with redrawing its congressional district lines, as Dick had ordered. A federal appeals court then set a Jan. 15 deadline for state lawmakers to craft a new redistricting plan with a second-majority Black district.
Shortly after the state legislature convened for a special session to draw new lines, it adopted a map that lawmakers said satisfied the district court’s ruling and also achieved certain political objectives. The plan protects certain “pivotal” Republican incumbents, according to GOP state senators, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Rep. Julia Letlow, the only woman in Louisiana’s congressional delegation.
But the new map changed the district of GOP Rep. Garret Graves, who backed Gov. Jeff Landry’s Republican opponent in the 2023 gubernatorial race and didn’t publicly support Scalise in his unsuccessful bid for House speaker.
Graves’ District 6 was reconfigured to create the second majority-minority district. It now stretches from Shreveport, in Louisiana’s northwest corner, to Baton Rouge, in the southeast, and connects predominantly Black populations from Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge.
The new plan kicked off the challenge that is now before the Supreme Court, as a group of 12 “non-African-American” voters argued it is a racial gerrymander that violates the 14th Amendment. They claimed that the legislature engaged in “explicit, racial segregation of voters and intentional discrimination” based on race and created two majority-Black districts without considering traditional redistricting criteria.
A divided three-judge district court panel sided with the voters and concluded that the map is an impermissible racial gerrymander. That decision, though, was halted by the Supreme Court after Louisiana Republicans and Black voters successfully sought to use the new map in the upcoming elections.
State GOP officials have lambasted the legal process that led them back to the high court again, lamenting in a filing to the justices that they are “stuck in an endless game of ping-pong — and the state is the ball, not a player.”
They told the justices the litigation over the redistricting plan forced them into a “lose-lose situation” — the legislature had to consider race to remedy the Section 2 violation the lower courts identified in the first map from 2022, but in doing so, considered race too much, as the three-judge district court panel found when it evaluated the new voting lines.
“Cases like this illustrate that there is seemingly no end to the torture-by-litigation that States endure after every redistricting cycle,” the state Republican officials wrote in their filing.
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Cargo ship launched to space station with supplies, science gear and holiday treats for crew
SpaceX launched an unpiloted Dragon cargo ship Monday evening, an election eve flight to deliver three tons of crew supplies, science gear and other equipment to the International Space Station, including an unusual wooden satellite, a solar wind monitor and holiday fare for the lab’s crew.
The Dragon’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from historic launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 9:29 p.m. EST, lighting up the night sky for miles around as it climbed away atop 1.7 million pounds of thrust.
NASA/SpaceX
After boosting the rocket out of the dense lower atmosphere, the first stage, making its fifth flight, peeled away, reversed course and headed back to an on-target landing at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station while the second stage continued the climb to space.
The landing marked SpaceX’s 57th successful booster recovery at the Florida Space Force station and its 363rd overall, including California flights and droneship landings.
Spaceflight Now
Just under 10 minutes after liftoff, the vacuum-optimized engine powering the Falcon 9’s second stage shut down and one minute later, the Dragon was released to fly on its own. If all goes well, it will catch up with the space station Tuesday morning and move in for docking at the lab’s forward port at 10:15 a.m.
One of the first items on the agenda is a test Friday to determine the Cargo Dragon’s ability to boost the space station’s orbit slightly using its aft-facing thrusters. The ISS is routinely re-boosted by Russian Progress freighters and Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ships, but Friday’s test will be a first for SpaceX.
The California rocket builder is under contract to NASA to build a powerful space tug of sorts that can be used to safely drive the ISS back into the atmosphere when the lab complex is retired in the 2030 timeframe. The vehicle is needed to make sure the station breaks up over a stretch of ocean well away from populated areas and shipping lanes.
During the test Friday, the Cargo Dragon’s aft thrusters will fire for about 12 minutes.
“The data that we’re going to collect from this reboost and attitude control demonstration will be very helpful, informing SpaceX analyses on how the system performs,” said Jared Metter, SpaceX director of flight reliability. “This data is going to lead to future capabilities, namely the US de-orbit vehicle.”
Reboost aside, the Cargo Dragon is loaded with slightly more than 6,000 pounds of equipment and supplies, including 2,022 pounds of science gear, 2,119 pounds of crew clothing, food and other supplies, 377 pounds of spacewalk equipment, 525 pounds of space station hardware and 44 pounds of computer equipment.
One of the more unusual payloads: Lignosat, a small wooden satellite using a framework of magnolia panels built by researchers at Kyoto University in Japan and the Tokyo-based logging company Sumitomo.
STR/JIJI PRESS / AFP via Getty Images
“While some of you might think that wood in space seems a little counterintuitive, researchers hope that this investigation demonstrates that a wooden satellite can be more sustainable and less polluting for the environment than conventional satellites,” said Meghan Everett, the ISS deputy project scientist.
“The main objective here is to determine whether wood can be used in space, and to do this, researchers will measure the temperature and strain of the wooden structure and see how it might change in the vacuum environment of space with atomic oxygen and radiation conditions as well.”
As with all station-bound Dragon cargo ships, the crew supplies include fresh food and special treats for holiday meals.
Bill Spetch, ISS operations and integration manager, said the “food kit” includes “citrus, apples, sweet onions, blueberries, radishes, etc,” along with lobster, crab and quail for holiday meals. A variety of cheeses is on board as well as fresh coffee and personal items requested by each crew member.
Mounted in the Dragon’s unpressurized trunk section is the Coronal Diagnostic Experiment, or CODEX, an instrument that will be mounted outside the space station to learn more about how charged particles in the solar wind are heated to millions of degrees and accelerated to enormous velocities, affecting Earth’s space environment and the rest of the solar system.
Inside the station, the astronauts will have a variety of new experiments and instruments to operate and monitor, including one called ARTEMOSS that will examine how Antarctic moss tolerates the space radiation and microgravity environment to learn more about how plants might be used in future life support systems.
The European Space Agency is sending up a space exposure experiment to learn more about how high-tech materials respond to prolonged exposure to the weightless environment and another experiment to study how organic samples degrade when exposed to unfiltered ultraviolet light from the sun.
And in an experiment that could be particularly useful to future astronauts, a small device known as Nanolab Astrobeat, provided by the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, will test cold welding technology that could prove useful for repairing leaks or other damage from inside a spacecraft.
The Cargo Dragon is expected to remain docked at the space station for about a month before it returns to Earth with station components needing refurbishment, trash and other no-longer-needed items.
