"The Supreme Court enjoys creating catch-22 scenarios. It has generated numerous instances. For example, it holds that the Free Exercise Clause forbids anti-religious discrimination, but also holds that the Establishment Clause sometimes requires anti-religious discrimination. It says that the Civil Rights Act prohibits race discrimination, but it created the disparate impact theory of liability, which sometimes requires race discrimination. And in the context of voting rights, it holds that the Equal Protection Clause forbids racial gerrymandering, but it also requires that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act sometimes necessitates racial gerrymandering.

This last paradox landed Louisiana in the Supreme Court after 33 years of near-constant litigation over its congressional maps. Following the Supreme Court, the lower courts have batted the state around like a ping-pong ball, voiding the state’s congressional maps because they’re racially gerrymandered, and then voiding them again because they’re not racially gerrymandered.

Now, the state begs the Court for relief from this “impossible” situation, but the Court isn’t likely to help, and that’s partly the state’s own fault.

The case turns on the complicated relationship between Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."