While much of the obvious has been covered in how the ascension of Republican Speaker Mike Johnson to that post will affect Louisiana politics, one under-the-radar aspect is how it can strengthen the state’s hand in the current legal tussle over congressional reapportionment.
Last year, Louisiana, which has a black voting age population of just under a third, enacted a plan that created one majority-minority district out of six. Special interests sued, claiming that the Voting Rights Act, despite its explicit statement that population proportions didn’t have to be translated into proportions of districts, required the state to have two M/M districts.
In a related Alabama case, the U.S. Supreme Court elevated racial proportion to a preferred status among reapportionment criteria, which include such things incumbent protection, continuity of representation, and keeping communities of interest together. Using that as a precedent, an Eastern District of Louisiana judge firstly threw out the enacted maps and secondly ordered new ones be drawn.
The decisions were appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which hasn’t ruled on the former but placed a stay on the latter, saying the former needed resolution first. The Supreme Court this month backed the stay, using the Louisiana case as a potential vehicle that gives the Court a chance to set parameters to its Alabama ruling. Practically speaking, if the former ruling stands, then the Legislature could deal with the latter next year during the regular session or in a special session preceding it without judicial involvement.
Assuming the legal wrangling ends in time for the change to occur next year, whatever the state’s majoritarian branches do can set an important precedent. The Alabama ruling instructed that preference should be given to proportional use of race to ensure that roughly as many districts proportional to a discrete minority group’s proportion in the population should exist to give that group a opportunity to elect a chosen candidate, but didn’t mandate that the proportional output should be constructed utilizing only M/M districts.
Thus, it left the door open for “opportunity districts,” or those where the minority population is sufficiently proportionally large enough to elect a chosen candidate without being a majority, to be utilized in this kind of mapping, subject to other reapportionment criteria. A subsequent Alabama attempt that created one M/M and one district with about 40 percent black population was found inadequate to meet the new criterion.
Louisiana might have the chance to define this further, if it must come to that. In contrast to the Alabama case, creating two rather than one M/M district does much greater violence to other reapportionment criteria, so there would be more leeway to creating an opportunity district instead. In fact, one bill offered during the 2022 First Extraordinary Session of the Legislature, called for reapportionment purposes, SB 22 by Democrat state Sen. Greg Tarver, did precisely this in making the Fifth District – which in two M/M plans was made narrowly the second M/M district – a bare majority white district with 43 percent black population.
The case for accepting this arrangement became stronger with Johnson’s ascending to the speakership, referring particularly to incumbency protection. With Johnson now the most powerful and important official in the House, it becomes more imperative to maintain a district in which he can get elected.
Almost every of over a dozen bills filed in sessions in 2022 to create two M/M districts made for convoluted plans with these districts at 53 and 52 or 52 and 51 percent black population and, as compared to the enacted plan which largely mirrored existing boundaries, considerably altered Johnson’s District 4 by chopping off its four southern-most parishes and instead pushing it to gobble up six parishes to the east and part of Ouachita now in District 5. Tarver’s plan did worse, removing more southern parishes and spreading further east, circling around Ouachita. Even so, Johnson’s district is nearly a third populated with blacks.
If the GOP legislative majority could swap some things around with CD 5 – for example, some of St. Landry parish for all of Grant – and work on CD 5’s borders with other districts, this could push CD 5 above 40 percent black while adhering more closely to CD 4’s pre-2022 boundaries and better protect Johnson. This would give the judiciary an interesting test case as to just how much preference to give race when other traditional factors loom large.
It may not come to this, but if it does, Johnson’s unexpected promotion may cause equally unanticipated permutations to Louisiana’s congressional maps.