During last month's Supreme Court oral arguments for Louisiana v. Callais, Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned attorney Stuart C. Naifeh on the presence of race in deciding the voting district.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Counsel, you said what's important on compactness is where the core of this district is?
00:07Well, it's not a question of compactness, your honor. It's a question of remedy. Does it remedy the violation that had been shown?
00:13This court has never said that states are required to draw compact districts.
00:17There's no obligation to draw compact districts if they're not doing it for, you know, if they're not drawing a non-compact district predominantly based on race without an adequate justification.
00:27So they can draw compact districts, non-compact districts as a remedy once a violation has been shown.
00:33And you think the drawing of this district was not predominantly based on race?
00:37I think that...
00:38I mean, it runs from one side of the state angling up to the other, picking up black populations as it goes along.
00:43Well, your honor, that was the plaintiff's position.
00:46But as the state identified interests, communities of interest that it had joined in that district, in that shape.
00:55And if you look at the historian, the Louisiana historian's amicus brief, they explain that it's not by chance that there are significant black populations in that corridor along the Red River.
01:06It's a result of history. It's a result of the history of slavery, of Jim Crow, and of the disparities that prevented the lack of economic opportunities that kept people there over generations.
01:18And so those ties are still there throughout the district.
01:21There are family ties, there are community ties, there are religious ties among those communities that are drawn together in that district.
01:28And that's part of what the state identified, what the legislature identified was the interests that they were drawing together in addition to the political reasons.
01:35So it's not a district that randomly draws together pockets of black population.
01:40I think what the chief is trying to get at is certainly politics played a role in this district, but didn't race?
01:47Absolutely, your honor.
01:48The state was trying to draw a district that would remedy the violation that we had shown.
01:54Which is another way of saying race predominated.
01:56Well, I would disagree with that, your honor.
01:58I think that race, that means race was one consideration.
02:01And this court has long said in case.
02:04I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
02:07Go ahead.
02:09Isn't saying race was one consideration another way of saying race predominated?
02:15And how do we square that with the 14th Amendment's promise that race should play no role in our laws?
02:25Well, in the redistricting context, this court has long recognized that legislators are always aware of race.
02:31And the fact that race was one thing they were considering when they drew the map does not mean it was the predominant thing.
02:37It means that it was one of many considerations that they had.
02:41Politics was another. Communities of interest was another.
02:44And without some evidence that would disentangle those things and show that, well, actually race, among all of those considerations the state was considering, race was the one that actually drove the lines.
02:55Race does not, the plaintiffs have not borne their burden to prove that racial predominance.
03:01Thank you, counsel.