Louisiana lawmakers have approved a new congressional map designed to help Republicans gain a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the map eliminates one of the state's two majority-Black districts, both currently represented by Democrats.
The approval in the Louisiana legislature came on Friday, following an April decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down Louisiana's existing map as an illegal racial gerrymander because it included two majority-Black districts. The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais weakened the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was intended to prevent discrimination against minorities at the ballot box.
The decision also intensified a national redistricting battle fueled by President Donald Trump's efforts to protect the Republicans' slim House majority in the midterm elections. Louisiana is one of several Southern states now redrawing their maps to benefit Republicans.
Louisiana Republicans had considered drawing a map that would give the party a chance to win all six of the state's U.S. House seats, but that would have required adding more registered Democrats to Republican-held districts, potentially backfiring with Republican losses. Currently, Republicans hold four of Louisiana's six congressional seats, and they are slated to pick up a fifth with the newly passed map.
The map was approved Friday by the Louisiana state Senate in a 28-10 vote. Republican Governor Jeff Landry is expected to sign the new map into law, even as threats of more litigation emerged Friday. A half-hour Senate floor debate revolved around Democrats contending that the proposed map is racially gerrymandered to squeeze more Black voters, who tend to be registered Democrats, into a single district.
Democratic state Senator Royce Duplessis pointed out that some fellow Southern states, such as South Carolina, had refused to redraw their maps in the middle of an election year. He warned that Louisiana is participating in a "vicious, vicious race to the bottom" by engaging in the redistricting push.
The bill's sponsor, Republican state Senator Jay Morris, repeatedly insisted that party affiliation, not race, drove the new district boundaries. "I purposely put more Democrats into District 2 to make the remaining districts better performing for Republicans," Morris said at one point. Morris said he instructed the map demographers to avoid including any data on race or sharing those statistics with lawmakers before the vote.
Democratic state Senator Sam Jenkins told Morris, "I think it's a racially gerrymandered district that's going to get us into a lot of trouble here." Morris replied, "Agree to disagree." Louisiana is currently using a map ordered by a lower court in 2024 to comply with the Voting Rights Act, which includes a second majority-Black district. However, that map was challenged in court, and the Supreme Court struck it down on April 30 as an illegal racial gerrymander.
Landry postponed the state's closed U.S. House primary slated for May 16 to allow for the new congressional map to be implemented. He later signed a law making the primary open and shifting the date to November 3. The proposed map redraws a district currently represented by Democratic Representative Cleo Fields, clustering it around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana. It also adds part of Baton Rouge to a heavily Democratic, majority-Black district based in New Orleans, represented by Democratic Representative Troy Carter.
More lawsuits are expected over the new map. Democrats say the proposed map could draw a legal challenge over racial gerrymandering, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana suggested Friday that it could sue, calling the map a "racial gerrymander hiding behind the thin veneer of partisanship." Meanwhile, the victorious plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision criticized the legislature's map for leaving a majority-Black district in place.
In the weeks following the Supreme Court's decision, other Republican-controlled Southern states have seized upon the weakened federal Voting Rights Act to redraw their own congressional districts. So far, Republicans are winning the nationwide redistricting contest, passing more partisan maps to gain House seats than Democrats. But that doesn't necessarily mean they will win in the narrowly divided U.S. House in November.
Republicans believe they could gain as many as 15 seats from their redistricting efforts so far, while Democrats think they could gain six seats from new districts in California and Utah. Meanwhile, a court decision in Wisconsin on Friday could give Democrats a new avenue to pick up seats in 2028. The liberal-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court said it would hear an appeal of a case filed by a bipartisan coalition of business executives that seeks to redraw the state's Republican-friendly congressional districts.
Source: www.aljazeera.com