The call hasn’t been made yet, so we don’t know for sure what the agenda will be for the special session legislators have been told will happen later this fall. But according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, the session won’t be about redrawing the state’s congressional map.

Instead, they likely will only move back the election schedule to ensure that candidates for House and Senate elections next year won’t have to qualify for their races before the U.S. Supreme Court issues its ruling in a much-anticipated Voting Rights Act case. That ruling could lead to a new map, so lawmakers want to make sure that candidate qualifying for the primary elections would occur afterward. “We are likely to address only the closed primary dates and wait on the Supreme Court ruling for the congressional maps,” said Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, R-West Baton Rouge.

There is some question as to whether any effort to redraw the map before the Callais v. Louisiana case is decided by the Supreme Court would moot the case and blow the entire strategy that Gov. Jeff Landry has been pushing. It’s Landry’s contention – not everybody buys this; we’re going to take an agnostic position on it – that everything Louisiana has done in drawing the 4-2 congressional map which put Cleo Fields in Congress last year has created the situation which will wipe out Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and eliminate the necessity for racially-gerrymandered districts for anything.

Whether you believe him or not, there is no doubt that a lot is riding on the Callais case. The state definitely doesn’t want to make it moot by drawing a new map.

Which is why we keep suggesting that the legislature draw a new map which is expressly conditional in the event the Supreme Court finds either that the current map violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause or that all or part of Section 2 of the VRA is invalidated.

It’s a reasonable argument that maybe it’s better to hold off on a new map. The problem is that people don’t trust politicians in Louisiana and what’s caused Landry’s soft approval ratings in large part is a particular trust deficit among his own core supporters.

He’s got to bring deliverables. And the biggest one among those is a new map that bounces Cleo Fields’ insider-trading, race-hustling, Squad-simping ass right out of Congress.

Because a lot of Landry’s voters blame him for putting Fields in Congress in the first place.

Now – as I’ve written, Fields is the unflushed toilet of Louisiana politics. The thing about an unflushed toilet is that once it’s flushed, things will go back to normal pretty quickly. The argument that a new map will be drawn as soon as the Supreme Court decides Callais – and we’ve heard a theory a couple of times that what the Court will do is declare that the current Louisiana map doesn’t violate Equal Protection but that Section 2 is unconstitutional in forcing these racially gerrymandered districts, which would mean that a new congressional map wouldn’t be mandated by the courts but certainly permissible – isn’t a terrible one.

But if the decision isn’t handed down until June, you will have people all over the state seething about the unflushed toilet. And they won’t be mollified until they hear that delightful sound of rushing water.

That’s a political problem that a conditional map would solve.

Especially given that this is what the Legislature is going to be wrestling with, and it will not be well-received…

[Secretary of State Nancy] Landry has advised them that any revised election schedule has to adhere to different federal and state laws and can’t interfere with scheduled local elections for mayor, parish or city council or with local tax votes. … Given the complications, it’s possible that legislators will have to reverse themselves and go back to the open primary for next year’s House and Senate elections. And it’s even possible that they won’t be able to redraw the congressional map and change the election schedule next year.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it – you kill the party primaries for next year’s elections and absolutely everybody involved in that decision is going to be made utterly unelectable.

That is a catastrophic mistake which will justifiably, necessarily end a whole lot of political careers.

Everyone will see through that as – at best – a transparent, naked effort to give Bill Cassidy a re-election to the Senate that he cannot get in a party primary scenario. At worst, because it’s widely expected that John Bel Edwards will enter next year’s Senate race soon, an open primary will turn the 2026 Senate race into the 2015 gubernatorial race, in which the established GOP candidate is picked apart by Republican challengers while Edwards gets to skate into the runoff, and ultimately to victory.

Hell, no.

Nancy Landry isn’t having a particularly good year, it’s fair to say. She just had her office’s lawyers fired by Attorney General Liz Murrill for trying to deviate from the state’s position in Callais, and Landry keeps complaining about both the congressional map and the primaries.

This is a bunch of bureaucratese and nobody – nobody – is interested in Nancy Landry’s problems. Hers is a ministerial position, not a policy position, and for her to tell the state legislature, the body empowered by the U.S. Constitution to dictate the time, manner and place of federal elections in Louisiana, what it can and can’t do is a bad idea.

So it’s beginning to look like we’re going to get a special session at which nothing positive is accomplished and the goal is to make less of a mess. At a time when nobody trusts the people involved.

Somebody needs to put a stop to this and wait for some more certainty before it starts if this is all we’re getting.