There’s a trial going on in Shreveport which might result in such an outcome, though we can’t say with any confidence which way it’s going to go.

A federal trial to determine whether Louisiana’s new congressional map that created a second majority Black district will hold began in Shreveport on Monday with two lawmakers testifying for the plaintiffs who want to overturn the boundaries.

The lawsuit challenging the map, specifically the Black 6th Congressional District, argues the boundaries stretching from Baton Rouge to Lafayette to Alexandria to Shreveport are based solely on race and therefore unconstitutional.

Both sides presented opening arguments at the Tom Stagg United States Western District Court House before a three-judge panel that includes Judge Carl Stewart, a Bill Clinton appointee from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and Judges Robert Summershays and David Joseph, both Donald Trump appointees from the Western District.

The plaintiffs were first to present their case in what is expected to be a three-day trial.

Republican Shreveport Sens. Alan Seabaugh and Thomas Pressly both testified that they believe the map passed by the Republican-dominated Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry was factored on race alone.

“We were there because we were basically told we had to draw a second majority minority district or the judge would,” Seabaugh said. “That was the only reason we were there.”

He was referring to two previous court opinions signaling that the previous map passed by the Legislature in 2022 violated the Voting Rights Act because it kept one Black district with a state whose population is about one-third Black.

“The racial component was the fundamental tenet,” Pressly testified. “We were told we had to have two African-American districts. Otherwise the court would draw the map for us.”

The defense’s counter to Seabaugh and Pressly’s arguments is that race wasn’t the only factor – that preserving Mike Johnson’s district so that Louisiana could go on having the Speaker of the House on Capitol Hill was equally important in the drawing of the map.

Yeah, but, the obvious argument would go, the current congressional map would do that – and there would have been no redrawing of the maps but for Obama judge Shelly Dick, the Baton Rouge-based judicial wrecker who created this mess in the first place by demanding a new round of redistricting on pain of her doing it herself, finding that the current 5-1 congressional map underrepresents black voters.

It’s pretty basic stuff. Dick said Louisiana’s voting population is essentially one-third black so Louisiana should have one third of its congressional districts be majority black.

Otherwise, without Dick’s racial requirement, we wouldn’t have changed the map.

As race alone can’t be used as a criterion for redistricting, that would indicate this new map would get thrown out.

Joseph and Summerhays might very well go for that argument. The question is what the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will do with it.

After all, the defense to this is that there were a whole bunch of ways to draw up a 4-2 map, and the minute Louisiana’s legislature chose one the new map isn’t based on race. For example, it could have been Julia Letlow’s district which was cut up and turned into a majority-black district rather than Garret Graves’ district – and the choice to stick it to Graves rather than Letlow was about politics rather than race.

We aren’t crazy about that argument because it assumes Shelly Dick was right about the 5-1 map in the first place, and we see no reason to make that assumption when the Eric Holder Justice Department had no problem with the creation of the 5-1 map back in the 2011 reapportionment. Why was it OK then but it’s not OK now?

The comeback to that is the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s 6-1 congressional map was discriminatory and so the precedent as changed. Except when Alabama went 6-1 it represented a fundamental change to their map. Louisiana’s map is the same as it was, and so the two scenarios are not on point.

But remember, the Legislature was called into session to create a 4-2 map because the Fifth Circuit refused to overrule Dick in the first place.

We just don’t know how this is going to go.

What we can say is there is a pretty good chance that this thing could get tied up in court long enough that this fall’s congressional elections will have to be held using the current 5-1 map, thus kicking the redistricting can down the road to the point at which there will be a Trump Justice Department which would then have no trouble whatsoever with a 5-1 map.

And that, if nothing else, is the value of that suit in Shreveport.