{"id":12712,"date":"2025-08-29T04:20:34","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T04:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/louisiana-republicans-try-to-gut-the-voting-rights-act\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T04:20:34","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T04:20:34","slug":"louisiana-republicans-try-to-gut-the-voting-rights-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/louisiana-republicans-try-to-gut-the-voting-rights-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Louisiana Republicans try to gut the Voting Rights Act"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/source><\/picture><\/a><\/div>\n
\n

A new court filing from Louisiana Republicans seeks to deliver a fatal blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racist gerrymandering<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court is hearing a Louisiana-based case<\/a> that will determine whether it’s legal to purposefully draw majority-minority districts at all — and Wednesday’s court filing<\/a> from Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill asks the justices to reject any consideration of race in redistricting.<\/p>\n

The filing basically asks the Supreme Court to find the state’s new congressional map — which was redrawn under court order to signal compliance with the Voting Rights Act and has two majority-Black districts out of six total — illegal. In a separate case, a federal appeals court recently upheld <\/a>a finding that the district maps for the Louisiana Legislature are in violation of the landmark 1965 law on voting.<\/p>\n

The filing includes the Orwellian declaration that Louisiana “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination.”<\/p>\n

The filing includes the Orwellian declaration that Louisiana “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination.” Essentially, this means Louisiana conservatives want the Supreme Court to unburden their state — and consequently, other states — from having to prevent flagrantly racist attempts to suppress the power of nonwhite voters in the redistricting process.<\/p>\n

It’s a gambit designed — as my colleague Jordan Rubin has noted<\/a> — to strike at the heart at the Voting Rights Act. And this comes after the Trump administration used a similarly dubious justification to pressure Texas Republicans<\/a> to institute a racist gerrymander in Texas<\/a> that dilutes Black and Latino voter power.<\/p>\n

Between its assortment of avowed bigots<\/a> and segregation-friendly policies<\/a>today’s conservative movement bears a stark resemblance to the one that rose to prominence during the Jim Crow era, bolstered by unmistakably racist policies that disempowered virtually anyone who wasn’t a white conservative. Louisiana’s court filing — and its potential implications for the Voting Rights Act’s protections — risks dragging the U.S. back to that period, to a time when white power could be openly<\/em> codified through the redistricting process, before a single vote was cast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/source><\/picture><\/a><\/div>\n

Ja’han Jones<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new court filing from Louisiana Republicans seeks to deliver a fatal blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racist gerrymandering. The Supreme Court is hearing a Louisiana-based case that will determine whether it’s legal to purposefully draw majority-minority districts at all — and Wednesday’s court filing from Louisiana Attorney General […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}