Reeves calls for special session to consider redrawing voting district lines
After objecting to the state of Virginia’s vote to remap election districts, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced on Friday afternoon that he will call a special session of the legislature once the U.S. Supreme Court decides a landmark redistricting case that could find the creation of Black-majority districts unconstitutional.
Reeves called a special session for 21 days after the Supreme Court rules in Louisiana v. Callais.
During the recent regular session, Reeves noted, the legislature discussed drawing new maps to comply with a decision from a federal judge from the Northern District of Mississippi.
The Mississippi Independent reported on a separate proposal to create new maps following a Supreme Court ruling against Louisiana’s Black majority districts, which died in committee. State senator Jeremy England (R-Vancleave) filed a joint resolution that would redraw the districts now represented by two Black state senators if the Supreme Court guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in its Louisiana v. Callais ruling. The move failed in committee, though lawmakers representing the Mississippi Senate districts suggested the legislature could revisit it.
The Louisiana case concerns whether the creation of two majority-Black districts in that state is unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, in violation of federal law. Reeves said the decision in the case could affect a ruling in the Mississippi case requiring the state to redraw its Supreme Court district lines after the lines were challenged in U.S. District Court.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations filed suit against the state arguing that the district lines diluted Black voting strength in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act. The state appealed the decision to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which put a hold on the ruling pending the outcome of Callais.
In making his announcement, Reeves wrote: “It is my sincere hope that, in deciding Callais, the U.S. Supreme Court will reaffirm the animating principle that all Americans are created equal and that when the government classifies its citizens on the basis of race, even as a perceived remedy to right a wrong, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that Americans of a particular race, because of their race, think alike and share the same interests and preferences – a concept that is odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.”
Image: Gov. Tate Reeves (via Wikimedia Commons)