Louisiana Approves Map Eliminating a Majority-Black District
Louisiana lawmakers gave final approval on Friday to a new congressional map that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, making it the second Southern state to draw and approve carving out such a district since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act last month.
The new map is Louisiana’s response to the court’s ruling, which rejected its previous congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander. After delaying the state’s 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.
The State Senate approved the map 28 to 10 on Friday afternoon, a day after a House vote that fell almost completely along party lines. Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, is expected to sign it into law. Primary elections for the state’s 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.
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.
When the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s 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.
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’s history of racism and segregation, accusing conservative lawmakers of intentionally moving to dilute their political influence. Roughly a third of the state’s population is Black.
“We dress it up in the dry language of redistricting — district boundaries, core principles, communities of interest — but everyone in this chamber knows exactly what we’re being asked to do,” said State Representative Kyle M. Green Jr., the chairman of the House Democratic caucus, during debate this month.
“The argument that we should now be colorblind about a congressional map in this state of all states,” he said, “requires forgetting a quantity of history that I don’t believe any of us has the right to forget.”
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’s grip on state politics. The new map protects Republican incumbents — Speaker Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise, the majority leader, among them — 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.
“I personally instructed our staff to turn the feature that displays racial makeup off, so that I wouldn’t see it,” 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.
At least one Republican member of the state’s congressional delegation — Representative Clay Higgins, who represents the Third Congressional District along the Gulf Coast — complained about the map.
“This Frankenstein looking thing was NO DOUBT drawn up by a very small handful of guys in a secret room,” Mr. Higgins wrote on social media. “NOBODY should support this insanely bad map.”
Even as state lawmakers have signed off on the new district boundaries, the specter of future court challenges looms.
“You can’t pass a map that doesn’t result in litigation, because in fact people who want opposite things often both file suits to try to get what they want,” said State Senator Jay Morris, speaking on the floor on Friday.
The coalition of voters who successfully challenged the previous Louisiana map as an illegal racial gerrymander has balked at preserving the state’s last remaining majority-Black district, based in New Orleans.
In a court filing in late May before the new map was finalized, the group said the map still violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution because it left the New Orleans district intact.
Nick Corasaniti and Irineo Cabreros contributed reporting.
