Jackson drew a comparison between the redistricting cases in question, Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, and accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She implied that minorities like black people are systemically blocked from accessing voting polls (a demonstrably false claim) and compared this to disabled people not being able to access a building.
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“Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities, and so it was discriminatory in effect because these folks were not able to access these buildings,” Jackson said. She argued that whether such discrimination is intentional is irrelevant.
“I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here. … We are responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantage minorities and make it so that they don’t have equal access to the voting system, right? They’re disabled. … We say that’s a way in which you see that these processes are not equally open.”
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“Following an injunction barring the map’s implementation by a district court judge, continued litigation in the case ultimately resulted in the state redrawing the map to include a second black-majority district. This led to another lawsuit from a different group of plaintiffs, who claimed the state unlawfully prioritized race in the map’s creation and therefore violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause,” Fleetwood reported. “A three-judge panel on a separate district court agreed with these plaintiffs and blocked the new map’s implementation.”
The Supreme Court was initially slated to decide the case during its 2024-2025 term, but announced in June that it would rehear the case this fall.
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Janai Nelson, arguing in favor of the second majority-black district, alleged that several lower court judges had acknowledged discriminatory practices in Louisiana’s maps, and claimed that “Louisiana’s creation of a district to remedy that discrimination and to ensure that black Louisianans have an equal opportunity to participate in the process is constitutional.”
Notably, Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., mourned the death of Assata Shakur — who was convicted of killing a state trooper and was added to the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list — as a “freedom fighter” and “example of undaunted resistance and resilience.”