Give Jeff Landry credit. It’s really only been hours since he took office as governor, and he already appears to be ahead of Louisiana’s political game.

As his first executive order upon moving into the big chair on the Fourth Floor of the state capitol, Landry voided a move by his predecessor John Bel Edwards that would have moved unqualified students forward in school in otherwise defiance of state law. As WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge explains…

Landry also reversed former Gov. John Bel Edwards’ decision to allow an appeals process and a potential path to graduation for high school students who don’t pass the LEAP tests. It was particularly likely to affect students whose primary language is something other than English and who are not yet proficient English-speakers.

Landry said eliminating the appeal ensures that students are “prepared for post secondary education and the workforce by meeting minimum standards of proficiency in core subjects,” according to the order.

The idiocy of the Edwards position was glaringly obvious. We speak English in Louisiana. How can you be considered educated by the standards of our taxpayer-funded schools and not be able to speak the language?

It doesn’t matter that this would negatively affect immigrants. You’re not doing them any favors by lowering standards to accommodate them. We fund an educational system in order that our children learn skills that will make them productive in life. How is it worth our while to water down the acquisition of those skills?

Edwards was always about coddling the lowest common denominator. It’s very refreshing to see someone in office who’s insistent on success rather than excuses for failure.

Another thing Landry did in his first day was more expected. He called a special session to deal with congressional redistricting, something which has been fairly controversial particularly among Republicans.

There’s a lawsuit, as our readers know, filed by Democrats in an effort to force a change in the state’s congressional map which would make a second majority-black district and likely unseat one of the five Republican members of the state’s congressional delegation. Louisiana’s population is one-third black, but there is no region of the state which is majority black. As such, it took some work to produce one majority-black district – Troy Carter’s 2nd District starts in Orleans Parish and crawls up the Mississippi River to pick up North Baton Rouge, which means Carter is representing two fairly distinct metropolitan areas which don’t have all that much in common.

Making a second majority-black district means plotting out something that looks like a Rorschach test. But that’s precisely what Shelly Dick, the partisan Democrat federal judge in charge of the redistricting case, plans to do.

The word is that Dick’s preferred map would make House Speaker Mike Johnson’s district a majority-black district by stretching it across the northern part of the state and down into the Mississippi delta, so that Shreveport and Angola would be in the same district. Landry is therefore bringing the Legislature into session on Monday in an effort to create a map which sucks less.

Nobody knows yet what that will look like. There’s talk the district likely to go into the crosshairs is the 6th District, which is Garret Graves’ seat. Graves backed Stephen Waguespack against Landry, and he also engaged in some tomfoolery on behalf of Kevin McCarthy in blocking Steve Scalise’s bid for Speaker (and attempting to block Johnson’s). He didn’t have a very good year last year and he’s unpopular among other members of the delegation as a result, which means if somebody is to go on the chopping block he’s a fairly likely suspect.

But making Graves’ district a majority-minority district or even getting it to 50-50 probably means taking North Baton Rouge back from Carter’s district – and doing that might make Carter vulnerable. Is there a possibility that the congressional map the legislature draws holds the possibility of making Louisiana’s delegation 6-0 rather than 4-2 based on two evenly-drawn districts? We’ve heard that one raised; we’re not sure we believe it.

There’s another possibility, which is that if a map is drawn which screws up Johnson’s district, or Julia Letlow’s or Clay Higgins’, it might meet with Dick’s imprimatur but if it’s drawn just right it could run afoul of the Voting Rights Act in other ways – and then somebody could run into court in the Western District of Louisiana seeking an injunction against that map.

And perhaps a friendly conservative judge in the Western District – Terry Doughty, for example – might grant such an injunction. And at that point there would be no hope of resolving the map issue in time for the 2024 congressional election, in which case the current map would stay in place. This is not an altogether unlikely scenario, nor is it one that anybody on the Republican side would be unhappy with.

Because if Donald Trump should win the presidential election this fall, it’s foreseeable that he would scrub the Justice Department of lawyers interested in pursuing these partisan redistricting cases, and without DOJ involved in the Louisiana case there could well be a problem of standing. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a similar lawsuit on the basis that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing, and while that case wouldn’t govern the Louisiana one it certainly creates an issue that could fall against the Louisiana plaintiffs. Even if those pieces don’t fall into place, you’d still get a two-year reprieve to keep a 5-1 map.

In any event, Landry’s special-session call included a couple of other things. He’s suggesting a re-drawing of the Louisiana Supreme Court’s districts to add a second majority-minority seat out of the seven. Doing so would likely result in five very conservative districts and two majority-black ones, and that would be bad news for white Democrats who have traditionally had an outsized amount of influence in the state’s courts.

Something else white Democrats won’t like is that Landry has put changing Louisiana’s election primary system into the call.

Specifically, dumping the jungle primaries and turning them into closed party primaries, something that the LAGOP has been screaming for almost forever but especially since Edwards’ first gubernatorial election victory in 2015.

The thing about closed party primaries isn’t just that they favor conservative Republicans over RINOs. They also favor black Democrats over white Democrats. The state’s registered Democrat voters are, after all, about 62 percent black. And that number almost certainly increases with closed party primaries, because there are a lot of older Democrat voters who never vote Democrat anymore but never had a reason to change their registration to independent or Republican. Most of those people are white.

The effect of closed party primaries would be to make Louisiana’s politics a lot more like Tennessee’s, where essentially the GOP is the “white” party and the Democrats are the “black” party, with a few exceptions. And while Tennessee has a few chaos-making Democrat lawmakers, as we saw last year, for the most part the Republicans and the Democrats figure things out fairly well – the policy getting made is conservative, but here and there the Democrats pull some crumbs from the table by making deals when they’re needed.

Experience seems to show that it’s the white leftists who muck things up by purporting to speak for downtrodden blacks whose interests they don’t actually have at heart. Downtrodden blacks who rise in society and stop being downtrodden, after all, might decide that they’d like to be Republicans, and we certainly can’t have that.

The point being that while the congressional redistricting map might well end up a loss, Landry seems determined to extract something meaningful out of the special session he’s got to call to address it.

We’ve been starving for Republican leadership willing to go on offense and achieving objectives through aggressive action. This is an indication Landry intends to be that, and it’s nice to see.

More, please.