Defiant red state gov tees up collision with judge over redistricting move

Gov. Tate Reeves on Friday announced that he will call lawmakers into a special legislative session to redraw Mississippi’s state Supreme Court districts, but it’s unclear when legislators will return to Jackson.

Reeves said Mississippi legislators will return to the state Capitol 21 days after the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case, a decision widely expected to roll back portions of the federal Voting Rights Act.

But the nation’s highest court has not yet issued the decision, and it’s unclear when it will. The court's next opinion day is April 29. Many observers expect the court to rule on the case sometime this summer.

“It is my belief and federal law requires that the Mississippi Legislature be given the first opportunity to draw these maps," Reeves wrote on social media. "And the fact is, they haven’t had a fair opportunity to do that because of the pending Callais decision."

The U.S. Supreme Court’s pending decision is happening at the same time that a federal judge in Mississippi is dealing with a redistricting case.

U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock, nominated to the federal bench by Republican President George W. Bush, ruled last year that one of the Mississippi Supreme Court districts violates the federal Voting Rights Act because it does not allow Black voters in one area a fair chance to elect a candidate of their choice.

Aycock allowed the Legislature to redraw the districts, but it declined. House Judiciary B Vice Chairman Jansen Owen, a Republican from Poplarville, said legislative leaders decided against redrawing the districts because they believe Aycock's decision was incorrectly decided, and they did not want to concede by redrawing them.

Since the Legislature did not redraw the districts, they decision on the case's future now heads back to Aycock. She is convening a court hearing on Tuesday in Aberdeen to discuss new districts, and she does not have to give any legal consideration to the governor's Friday announcement.

Aycock's ruling has also left Supreme Court Justice David Ishee in limbo. Since her order prohibited the state from using those maps in future elections, he could not qualify for reelection this year, but his term does not expire until January 2028.

The legal fight over the court distircts began in 2022 when the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, the Southern Poverty Law Center and private law firms on behalf of a group of Black Mississippians filed a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act against the state.

The civil rights organizations have submitted three different proposals to Aycock for how the districts should be redrawn. The state has not yet submitted any proposals to Aycock, but it has until Saturday to do so.

The state appealed the lower court's ruling to the a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals but the state did not ask Aycock to pause lower-court proceedings while the appeal played out.

The 5th Circuit, however, did pause its appellate proceedings until the U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision in the Lousiana v. Callais case.

Mississippi lawmakers have not redrawn state Supreme Court districts since 1987.

Current state law establishes three distinct Supreme Court districts, commonly referred to as the Northern, Central and Southern districts. Voters elect three judges from each of these districts to make up the nine-member court.

The main district at issue in the case is the Central District, which comprises many parts of the majority-Black Delta and the majority-Black Jackson Metro area. Currently, two white justices, Kenny Griffis and Jenifer Branning, and one Black justice, Leslie King, represent the district.

No Black person has ever been elected to the Mississippi Supreme Court, in the state with the highest percentage of Black residents, without first obtaining an interim appointment from the governor, and no Black person from either of the two other districts has ever served on the state’s high court.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.