The Supreme Court punted the case of Louisiana’s gerrymandered congressional map last month and that’s a shame. The Court has made a number of recent rulings, including one in Florida which upheld a 20-8 map drawn by its Republican legislature, which indicate that the 4-2 Louisiana map Gov. Jeff Landry dragged through the state legislature under duress early last year is a goner.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott is calling a special session to redo their congressional map in line with the direction the Supreme Court is moving…
Though Texas is not due to draw new House lines until after the 2030 census, Republicans are looking to defend a narrow 220-212 House majority next year and are contending with the traditional headwinds typically associated with the president’s party during midterm cycles. The inclusion of redistricting in Texas’ special session drew a strong rebuke from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) who criticized the governor for his handling of the deadly flooding in Texas, saying further that in a statement that “Instead of aggressively addressing the failures of his administration, Governor Abbott and shameless extremists are conspiring with Donald Trump and House Republicans to try to rig the election and disenfranchise millions of voters.” Republicans control the state Legislature, governor’s office and state Supreme Court, meaning the party will be able to easily overcome any Democratic opposition to redrawing the state’s maps. However, it remains unclear how that litigation could play out if it makes its way through the federal court system, particularly as the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama’s maps in 2023 for likely violating the Voting Rights Act. Another looming question is whether redistricting the maps could endanger Republicans in nearby districts and make their seats potentially more competitive.
The 2023 Alabama case, which was held up as the justification for the 4-2 Louisiana map, is clearly an outlier at this point, as a South Carolina case decided just after it went much more in a pro-state direction.
We’re told by close observers of the Callais v. Louisiana case, which is the one about the 4-2 map, that it’s going to be a 6-3 decision throwing out the map. The reason it was punted last month was that two of the six, and it’s speculated that those two are Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts, are on the fence not about tossing the Louisiana map but about whether to throw out Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional.
Section 2 is the part which says you have to draw districts to create majorities for minority racial groups and thus insure their people are proportionally represented. In other words, if Louisiana’s population is a third black, then a third of its congressional districts have to be black districts. That might be fine if those districts can be drawn without looking like Rorshach tests, but of course that’s rarely how populations are distributed and it certainly isn’t how Louisiana’s population is distributed.
The Supreme Court has been tying itself in knots for a couple of decades trying to square Section 2 with the Constitution as cities lose population to suburbs and exurbs and our population gets more diverse so all this isn’t simply a question of white people and black people. They’re finally at the point where this isn’t workable anymore and it’s a matter of time before Section 2 goes down.
Either way, the current map is doomed.
And that’s why it would be a very good idea for Landry, who is struggling a bit with his conservative base, to call a special session to put it out of its misery and bring back a 5-1 congressional map.
There are a couple of things going on here that such a special session might remedy.
The first one is pure politics, for Landry but also for a vast swath of the legislators, many of whom are grumbling about the governor.
Ask around, particularly among Republicans who have turned on Landry, and you will hear time and again that the number one problem they’ve got with him is that Garret Graves is not in Congress and Cleo Fields is, and that it’s because Landry forced the Legislature to change that map.
And it really doesn’t matter whether that’s the whole story. It’s an irritant. It’s a wound which won’t heal. It might not have been so bad if Fields went to Congress and gave Mike Johnson votes on key things like the Big Beautiful Bill or the rescission package that passed last night. But Fields is an atrocious vote. He’s as bad as Troy Carter is.
Landry’s position is that map is strategic, and when the Supreme Court tosses it, that’ll be the end of these court challenges to the 5-1 maps. And maybe that’s true, but it’s a great reason why it’s a good idea to pass a 5-1 map now rather than later.
There’s another thing going on, and this one is more consequential than whether Landry can turn around his approval rating.
Namely, that the Secretary of State’s office is beginning to express concerns that having to recalibrate for a new congressional map in advance of the party primaries next spring means that map needs to be in place by some time in September.
So assuming the Supreme Court torches the current map, you’ll need their reargument of the case and then a decision, then you’ll need the drawing of a new map and the legislative debate and passage of that map.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t get to this until September, which is what the word is, then you’re going to miss that deadline with all the attendant activity.
And that’ll mean the likely way to conduct next year’s federal elections will be to go back to the old jungle primary system for the federal races rather than conduct them according to the party primaries the legislature brought back last year.
Guess who that helps:
Bill Cassidy.
So if you don’t have a map ready, you get Cassidy, plus John Fleming and Blake Miguez and whoever else gets in on the GOP side, and maybe a John Bel Edwards, and you can’t sort that out in an orderly party primary. Instead you end up with the 2015 gubernatorial election, and Team Cassidy starts accusing his conservative detractors of doing to the Republican “favorite” what Jay Dardenne and Scott Angelle did to David Vitter.
I’m not saying that’s a legitimate argument. I am saying you’ll hear it and it’ll scare donors away.
And if Cassidy gets another six years, or worse, if we get six years of a John Bel Edwards representing Louisiana in the Senate in a manner not dissimilar to Cleo Fields’ ascendance into that congressional seat, people will not be complimentary of those responsible for it.
You can have a special session to draw up a contingent map. You can make the thing more or less identical to the map used in the 2022 elections. Better, in fact, because Graves caused a ton of consternation by insisting that his district contained a slice of the state’s coastline; that made for some hard feelings. Nobody has to listen to Graves this time; he’s not in Congress.
And not for nothing, but Garret Graves is sitting on $6.5 million in a campaign war chest with nothing to run for. It might not be a bad idea if you’re Jeff Landry to open some space for him to retake his old seat next year, particularly if he could do it at Fields’ expense.
Otherwise, Garret Graves might very well decide to run for something in 2027. And it isn’t hard to figure out what that would be.