IANAL, but I’ll take a whack at it. First, the sequence of events:
Louisiana GOPers gerrymandered themselves into a supermajority.
Black voters sued in LA court, arguing there is concrete evidence of racist disenfranchisement.
Black voters won. The LA lege was ordered to create new maps that are fair.
LA GOP doesn’t want to do that, so they appealed to SCOTUS.
SCOTUS threw the LA GOP a bone. There was another case, Allen v Michigan, that was essentially the same, and which SCOTUS had already agreed to hear. SCOTUS ordered LA to pause everything until Allen was decided.
Allen got decided. The ruling did not make the LA GOP’s bad map acceptable. So, SCOTUS told LA lege they must abide by the LA court and use fair maps. The next step was a hearing in LA court to figure out how to pick a map.
LA GOP doesn’t want a fair map, so they obviously don’t want that hearing to even happen. So they appealed to the 5th Circuit, and also asked them to issue an order canceling the map-picking meeting.
That’s the “writ of mandamus,” which is basically when a court literally orders you to “do your job as required by law.” They wanted the superior court to use its powers to disrupt the process that the lower court was forcing them to step through in pursuit of fair maps. This would be a win for them, because the bad maps are still in place. They want to run out the clock on the election.
The 5th Circuit is FedSoc, so they want the LA GOP to stay in power, and that means they also don’t want fair maps, so they issued the writ.
KBJ’s concurrence points out that issuing the writ was “extraordinary,” i.e. outrageous and inappropriate.
Black voters appealed to SCOTUS.
Today, SCOTUS refused to hear the case, and KBJ adds her concurrence.
So, what now?
The 5th Circuit still hasn’t decided the case. Maybe it will take a while, maybe they will side with the GOP, maybe they will side with black voters, maybe they will just refuse to overturn the lower court.
They are FedSoc, so you can be sure they will look for ways to help the rich minority party stay in power even if they are ultimately not able to issue a ruling that explicitly grants them a win. And that is why KBJ issued her concurrence:
KBJ says that the LA lege and LA court are expected to resume abiding by the original verdict until and unless the 5th Circuit overturns the lower court. Her goal is to prevent the 5th Circuit from letting the LA GOP win by running out the clock. As long as the map that’s in place is the bad map, time is on the side of the LA GOP. But if the LA lege starts to <ahem> do its job as required by law, that situation can be flipped: a fair map can be selected, which would then stand until and unless the FedSocs on the 5th Circuit actually stick their necks out by issuing a ruling filled with bad law.
What KJB effectively did by her remark is tell the District (trial level) Court to go ahead and prepare a decent map while the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decides what to do with the Supreme Court’s ruling. The District Court’s map will surely be appealed by the Republicans to the Fifth Circuit. However the Fifth Circuit rules, it will be appealed to the Supreme Court. But, as another commenter here noted, KJB is trying to keep the process moving so the Republicans don’t run out the clock. (There is case law saying that you can’t litigate maps if it’s too close to the election date.)
The suggestion in the article - that state officials and the 5th Court conspired to slow-walk the redistricting process would be an ugly hybrid [whisper:deep state] of republican synergy.
Hard to prove too. But since stalling is a republican hallmark it’s almost believable.
That sounds like some kind of vast, right-wing conspiracy.
But that’s insane. Nobody is spending years of effort and billions of dollars to install co-conspirators in all the courts, just so they can handicap democracy. We would have seen evidence of it. Some muck-raking public interest group would eventually find the salmon in the cookie jar.
Thanks for the detail, but let’s just go ahead and skip to the end, where the SCOTUS 6 rule in favor of Alexander and, poof, every racially gerrymandered map gets labeled partisan, which is A-OK with them.
“No, we aren’t shutting out blacks. We’re shutting out democrats.”
That’s quite an accusation made about senate democrats after obviously doing zero research. Following your logic, I would assume that Biden was unable to seat any federal judges because the senate republicans would have blocked them all. And yet, senate democrats got more Biden nominations through than DT was able to with a republican senate during his first 2 years.
As @txlawyer pointed out, dems blocked the DT nominations that they could. I would add that not every DT appointment to lower courts has been summarily awful. IOW, they don’t all automatically side with republicans like Cannon and Rao do.
ETA: I understand the frustration that we can’t get more done besides the judicial noms, but I would urge you to look into some of the structural obstacles we have. Eg, Manchin has been great with judicial nominations, but with our thin majority, we can’t get some other things done as long as he blocks any change of the filibuster rules. Don’t tar all democrats with his failures.
