The adage it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission has never been more in evidence than in the proposed congressional map for the state of Louisiana.
It would seem that the thoroughly gerrymandered layout of the state’s six congressional districts is a done deal. I mean, after all, voters go t the polls Tuesday to elect representatives in each of the carved-out districts that will (theoretically) guarantee two black congressmen for the state.
There should be no problem with Blacks having one-third of the state’s congressional representation. After all, a third of Louisiana’s population is African-American.
But when you look at the manner in which the districts were drawn in order to get there, you get a visual image of legislators contorting themselves like they were playing a weird game of Twister. It’s really amazing what legislators (read Republicans) will do to protect their own – or at least their perceived own.
And Louisiana is by no means unique. Republican legislators in other states also did everything humanly possible to keep lily-white districts – and their Republican representations – intact.
It might be something for a SNL skit, except this is real life and it’s not necessarily funny but the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) announced Monday that it will hear arguments in the ongoing dispute about Louisiana’s congressional redistricting – next year. Early next year, months after Tuesday’s election.
Amy Howe, who publishes an online blog devoted exclusively to SCOTUS news, WROTE ON MONDAY that the court will hear Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais. Both cases are challenges to the proposed congressional map.
“The legislature drew the map after a federal district court ruled that the prior plan, created in 2022, likely violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race, by diluting the votes of the state’s Black residents,” she wrote. Under that 2022 plan, only one of the state’s six congressional districts was a majority-Black district while, based on 2020 census, which bore little difference to the one already in place.
NBC NEWS reported that the case pending before SCOTUS will have no effect on Tuesday’s election.
But this proposed plan, if approved by the court, is really going to put a strain, physically and financially, on candidates in the future in any hotly-contested races. The proposed 5th District, for example, will have candidates scrambling from Morehouse, West and East Carroll parishes on the Arkansas border, all the way down to the toe of the state’s boot in the parishes of St. Helena, Tangipahoa and Washington.
And the new majority-Black district, the 6th District? That one will snake diagonally from Caddo Parish in the state’s extreme northwest corner, southeastward to East Baton Rouge Parish, deep in South Louisiana.
Opponents went marching off to federal court where they filed their claim that the 2024 was unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. A three-judge panel of the federal district court agreed and told the state it could not use the plan in future elections.
But in May, SCOTUS, in a split ruling knocked down the federal district court’s decision, clearing the way for the Nov. 5 election.
Poor Attorney General Liz Murrill. She claims that the state is gotten itself into “an endless game of ping-pong.” I suppose that must be some new term in legalese. Howe said the state argued that “it will be sued for racial gerrymandering if it adopts another map with two majority-Black districts, but it will also be sued for violating the Voting Rights Act if it adopts a map with only one such district.”
Opponents countered with a pretty interesting argument of their own, pointing out that the federal district court never addressed the obvious effect of the legislature’s rather obvious political objective: protecting MAGA Republicans Speaker Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow, Clay Higgins and Steve KKK Scalise by protecting the purity and sanctity of their white districts. That left Garret Graves as the sacrificial lamb. Rather than face all but certain defeat in the new majority-Black district, he simply opted not to seek reelection.
With the current makeup, does anyone care to make a wager on whether SCOTUS will rule to uphold Louisiana’s heavily MAGA legislature or send lawmakers back to the drawing board – after the fact? My money is on the 6-3 MAGA majority on the Supreme Court.
Louisiana Voice 
Whether to have two Black-opportunity congressional districts is not the only issue in the redistricting litigation. The legislature did not have to resort to such blatant gerrymandering to get two such districts. All they had to do was create six geographically reasonable, community-based districts. They could have easily done that by drawing two new districts, one based in New Orleans, and one based in Baton Rouge. Scalise’s district could have been redrawn as a Jefferson Parish/River Region-based district. Reasonable districts could have been drawn for the rest of the state that would be geographically compact and also preserve or improve election prospects for Johnson, Letlow, and Higgins. The Voting Rights Act expressly states that it does not require racial groups to have pollitical representation proportional to their percentages of the population; however, it demands that redistricting not divide or concentrate ethnic voters so as to diminish the normal electoral influence they would have depending on where they live. Racial gerrymandering is segregation by another name and accurately condemned as unconstitutional. Our legislators don’t have to be lapdogs to the congressmen, and our Attorney General could have presented a persuasive case against the 6th District gerrymander in the Middle District U.S. Court if he’d understood the relevant law better, and if his legislative clients had had more integrity and concern for the civic interests of the people they were elected to serve when they did their careless redistricting. Hopefully when it gets to the Callais case from the Western District, the Supreme Court will throw out the atrocious gerrymanders and require the legislature to redraw all the congessional districts according to traditional redistricting criteria respecting the actual unified boundaries and shared features of all of our municipal communities. If the legislature can’t accomplish that, the federal judges should do it for them. I’m very confident they would not carve up Baton Rouge, putting part of it in a district with Shreveport, part in a district with Monroe, and part in a district with New Orleans.