Spike Lee Calls Supreme Court Voiding Race-Based Redistricting Map in Louisiana an ‘Attack on Voters’

Director Spike Lee, in a recent interview with CNN, called the United State Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling declaring a race-based redistricting map in Louisiana an “attack on voters.”

“They’re going to be movies and documentaries about this period of the United States of America. With this guy in the White House — just down the block, right?” Spike Lee said of President Donald Trump. “It’s not the first this country’s been through stuff. And it’s found a better way to live and we gotta work at it.”

“Let’s realize, black folks, we got a lot of our stuff through voting,” the Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman director said. “So, you know what the game plan is when you see this attack on voters. So, we know what they’re doing.”

Writing for the majority in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24–109 in the Supreme Court of the United States, Justice Samuel Alito accused lower courts of enforcing race-based discrimination as a mean to eradicate race-based discrimination.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” Justice Alito wrote.

“This tension between §2 and the Constitution came to a head when Louisiana redrew its congressional districts after the 2020 census. In 2022, a federal judge in the Middle District of Louisiana held that the map adopted by the state legislature likely violated §2 because it did not include an additional majority-black district,” Justice Alito explained. “But when the State drew a new map that contained such a district, its new map was challenged as a racial gerrymander. A three-judge court in the Western District of Louisiana held that the new map violated the Equal Protection Clause, and the State appealed to this Court.”

“For over 30 years, we have assumed for the sake of argument that the answer is yes. And we have gone further and assumed that it is enough if a State ‘ha[s] a strong basis in evidence’ for thinking that the Voting Rights Act requires race-based conduct,” Alito wrote. “But allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. These and other problems convinced us that the time had come to resolve whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting.”

Democrats across the country, from Barack Obama to Kamala Harris, have lamented the ruling, rolling out recycled, racially-charged talking points like the one ABC’s The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg launched last week. She said the Supreme Court striking down Louisiana’s second majority-black congressional district was meant to discourage “people of color” from voting.

States are already making changes to their Congressional delegations. Last week the Florida legislature approved a new congressional map offered by Gov. DeSantis (R), which would likely result in a 4-seat pickup for Republicans. The new map would bring the breakdown to 24 Republican seats to 4 Democrats.

President Donald Trump has already praised both Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) and Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) for their efforts to call on their respective legislatures to redraw their Congressional maps ahead of the midterm, netting more Republican seats.