Attempts by Republican-led state legislatures to draw congressional redistricting maps following the 2020 census have been highly litigious affairs, as those maps are frequently challenged by Democrat-aligned activist groups alleging various violations of voting rights and the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced that it would intervene in just such a case in Louisiana, where allegations of racial discrimination have left the state in limbo over how its congressional districts should be divided, according to The New York Times.

The case, which won't be heard or decided until next year, won't have an impact on this year's elections but could prove consequential for future elections in Louisiana and other states.

State sued by interest groups on both sides

According to NBC News, the Supreme Court has agreed to intervene in a perplexing legal dispute that has found Lousiana and its Republican-led state legislature sued by interest groups on both sides of the ideological divide.

The state was first sued by Democrat-aligned plaintiffs in 2022 after a redistricting map was drawn by the state legislature that included only one majority-black district in the state's six congressional districts, which the plaintiffs argued violated the Voting Rights Act's prohibition against racial discrimination by diluting the black vote since black voters make up roughly one-third of Louisiana's population.

A federal district court agreed with the plaintiffs and ordered the state legislature to redraw the map with at least two majority-black districts to more closely represent the state's demographic breakdown. The legislature complied and approved a redrawn map earlier in 2024 that included two majority-black districts.

However, that map was subsequently challenged with a lawsuit by a group of "non-African-American" voters in the state who alleged that the second majority-black district violated the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment and constituted an illegal racial gerrymander, in that the district connected a majority-black area around Shreveport in the northern part of the state with a distinctly separate majority-black area around Baton Rouge in the southern part of the state.

A different federal district court agreed with the second set of plaintiffs and struck down the new map approved this year as unconstitutional, which prompted an unlikely alliance between the Republican-led state legislature and the first group of Democrat-aligned plaintiffs asking the Supreme Court to intervene and settle the dispute.

Louisiana now trapped in an "endless game of ping-pong"

According to SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court revealed on Monday that it had accepted the appeal for intervention and would hear oral arguments in the case early next year, with a final decision rendered by the end of the current term in June or July.

The high court had already intervened in May with an emergency decision that placed a hold on the second district court's decision that struck down the new map, meaning Louisiana will use the potentially unconstitutional and racially gerrymandered map with two majority-black districts in the elections this week.

In seeking the Supreme Court's intervention, Louisiana asserted that it had become entangled in an "endless game of ping-pong" in which it would be sued regardless of what it did with the congressional map and argued that the "redistricting saga must end" with a final resolution.

Indeed, the state was sued on the one hand for discrimination by allegedly not considering race when the legislature drew up its initial map but was then sued on the other hand for considering race too much with a gerrymandered second majority-black district.

Ironically shifting arguments

As noted by NBC News, this dispute in Lousiana has resulted in an ironic and unexpected alliance between the Republican-led state legislature and the Democrat-aligned civil rights group, the Legal Defense Fund, that initially sued the state and lawmakers over the first redistricting map that resulted in a court order for a new map.

The LDF, in an apparent about-face from its first arguments for a court order, now says that if the second court order it finds unfavorable is left standing it will "further inject the federal courts into the redistricting process and deprive states of the necessary flexibility to take account of other legislative priorities when they act to remedy identified violations" -- which was one of the state's arguments in the first case that the civil rights group fought against.