Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana on Friday signed a new congressional map that would eliminate one of the state\u2019s two majority-Black districts, m\u200baking his state the second in the South to draw and approve carving out such a district since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act\u200b last month.<\/p>\n
The new map is Louisiana\u2019s response to the court\u2019s ruling, which rejected its previous congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander. After delaying the state\u2019s U.S. House primaries and negotiating for weeks, the Republican-controlled Legislature settled on redrawing the district at the center of the ruling in a way that reduces the number of Black voters who live in it and hands Republicans a structural advantage ahead of the November midterms.<\/p>\n
The State Senate approved the map<\/a>, 28 to 10, early Friday afternoon, a day after a House vote that fell almost completely along party lines. Mr. Landry, a Republican, signed it shortly after. Primary elections for the state\u2019s six U.S. House seats have been pushed to Nov. 3, about six months later than all of the other primary elections in the state.<\/p>\n Representative Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat whose district was eliminated, has not definitively said whether he will run in a new district that favors Republicans. <\/p>\n When the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana\u2019s congressional map, it raised the bar to bring a discrimination claim under the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights law that was passed in 1965 to protect minority voters. It also prompted Republican-led legislatures across the South to debate whether and how to carve up majority-Black districts held by Democrats that had previously been shielded under the law.<\/p>\n In Louisiana, as in several other Southern states, some votes had already been cast in House primaries, prompting confusion and lawsuits. Black constituents invoked the state\u2019s history of racism and segregation, accusing conservative lawmakers of intentionally moving to dilute their political influence. Roughly a third of the state\u2019s population is Black.<\/p>\n \u201cWe dress it up in the dry language of redistricting \u2014 district boundaries, core principles, communities of interest \u2014 but everyone in this chamber knows exactly what we\u2019re being asked to do,\u201d said State Representative Kyle M. Green Jr., the chairman of the House Democratic caucus, during debate this month.<\/p>\n \u201cThe argument that we should now be colorblind about a congressional map in this state of all states,\u201d he said, \u201crequires forgetting a quantity of history that I don\u2019t believe any of us has the right to forget.\u201d<\/p>\n Republicans, including those in Louisiana, have argued that race is not a factor in their rush to redraw district lines, and that they were only looking to tighten their party\u2019s grip on state politics. The new map protects Republican incumbents \u2014 Speaker Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise, the majority leader, among them \u2014 and opens up a new opportunity in the Sixth Congressional District, which Mr. Fields flipped for Democrats in 2024. That district, which had snaked across the state, is now far more compact and confined to the southern part of Louisiana.<\/p>\n \u201cI personally instructed our staff to turn the feature that displays racial makeup off, so that I wouldn\u2019t see it,\u201d said State Representative Beau Beaullieu, a Republican who led debate on the House floor on Thursday, referring to the data lawmakers used to come up with the new map.<\/p>\n At least one Republican member of the state\u2019s congressional delegation \u2014 Representative Clay Higgins, who represents the Third Congressional District along the Gulf Coast \u2014 complained about the map.<\/p>\n \u201cThis Frankenstein looking thing was NO DOUBT drawn up by a very small handful of guys in a secret room,\u201d Mr. Higgins wrote on social media<\/a>. \u201cNOBODY should support this insanely bad map.\u201d<\/p>\n Even as state lawmakers have signed off on the new district boundaries, the specter of future court challenges looms.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t pass a map that doesn\u2019t result in litigation, because in fact people who want opposite things often both file suits to try to get what they want,\u201d said State Senator Jay Morris, speaking on the floor on Friday.<\/p>\n The coalition of voters who successfully challenged the previous Louisiana map as an illegal racial gerrymander has balked at preserving the state\u2019s last remaining majority-Black district, based in New Orleans.<\/p>\n