Yesterday the Democrats in Louisiana got to throw their fit over the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, and it was a hell of a show.

The complaint wasn’t so much about the decision – there isn’t much point in screaming about the Supreme Court when you’re a state legislator and part of a super-minority. Instead, Rep. Kyle Green, who chairs the Black Caucus in the state House of Representatives, and the rest of the complainers were angry that Gov. Jeff Landry responded to the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling by suspending the elections for the state’s congressional seats, early voting for which was set to begin on Saturday.

It was a bit of screaming at the sky. It turns out that if your congressional map is illegal, you can’t elect congressmen with it. You’re taking a pretty big chance that Congress won’t seat them – and a colossal chance that someone will sue you for electing people illegally, and they’ll win.

So Landry did not just the smart thing, but the only thing. When you fight the law, the law wins. Even if you’re a Democrat.

Then, this morning, an 8-1 Supreme Court decision gave Louisiana the official go-ahead to draw a new map and set up the Congressional races. They’ll likely be jungle primaries, which is not optimal but it won’t be the end of the world so long as House races return to party primaries in time for the 2028 cycle, and the primaries will be in November with the runoffs in December.

Which means the next question is, “what’s the map going to look like?”

The answer is that it’s probably going to be a bit like the 5-1 map which existed before the Robinson case, the one the NAACP brought in front of Obama judge Shelley Dick in the Middle District of Louisiana which started the mess Callais cleaned up. Louisiana’s six-district congressional maps have generally had a consistent feel to them, outside of the 4-2 map the Democrats are lamenting the loss of, and this one will probably hold to the formula.

Which is…

• 1st District: suburban New Orleans, including the Northshore
• 2nd District: majority black, New Orleans proper, snaking up the Mississippi and grabbing North Baton Rouge
• 3rd District: south central to southwest Louisiana, including Lafayette and Lake Charles
• 4th District: northwest Louisiana down to west-central Louisiana; Barksdale AFB to Fort Polk
• 5th District: northeast and central Louisiana (Monroe and Alexandria), the Mississippi Delta and into the northern Florida Parishes
• 6th District: most of Baton Rouge and all of its suburbs, parts of the River and Bayou parishes

There could be some tweaks around that formula, but that’s what a 5-1 map has always looked like when the Louisiana legislature draws it.

Interestingly, though, the now-current interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court laid down in Callais would make Louisiana free to pursue a 6-0 map.

There are lots of Republicans pushing for that. Word has it that last week there was a conference call involving the White House, Gov. Jeff Landry and several members of the state’s congressional delegation, and the White House asked for a 6-0 map.

And the word was that Landry balked.

Why?

Well, there are a few reasons why he would.

The one everybody will come to first is the perception that Landry protects Cleo Fields. And that isn’t a lie – he does seem to do right by Fields often. The word is that the congressional map Louisiana is going to draw will have a 2nd District which is a little more Fields-friendly than Troy Carter-friendly, though there has been talk about weighting that district as 50-50 between the two as possible.

Meaning that it would be Troy Carter who’s the loser in Louisiana going from 4-2 to 5-1 and not Fields.

That would seem unusual, except for the fact that Cleo Fields is a whole lot better at politics than Carter is. Fields has done a lot better job of cultivating the Black Caucus politicians, for example, than Carter ever did. And Fields bet right when he didn’t mobilize his get-out-the-vote organization for the hopeless Shawn Wilson campaign in advance of the 2023 gubernatorial primary, which let Landry win without a runoff.

Troy Carter is a pretty mindless national Democrat who regurgitates everything the DNC tells him to. Fields’ votes will generally be identical, but he’ll take a walk on a vote about men in girls’ sports or pediatric sex changes, for example. That isn’t to call Cleo Fields a centrist – he isn’t. He’s just not stupid like Carter is.

But for everybody not in the 2nd District, few are going to care which communist black Democrat represents that district.

But there’s a better reason why Landry would prefer to “lay up” with a 5-1 map rather than go for broke at 6-0.

And it’s not fairness, and it’s not fear of ending up back in court. It’s math.

Can you draw a 6-0 map? Yes. You can draw it lots of different ways.

But the way it’s almost certainly going to be drawn, if you’re trying to pass it, would be to put most of Orleans Parish in Steve Scalise’s district. And while Scalise is almost certainly going to win even if you make his district purple, if you weaken his base too much what you’re going to do is to invite the Democrats to roll into Louisiana with millions and millions of dollars to spend against Scalise trying to take him out.

Can that be done? It’s probably a waste of money, sure, but $15-20 million spent in a House race in New Orleans means every single vote in the worst neighborhoods in Orleans Parish gets turned out and it becomes a major fight not to lose one of the best members of Congress Louisiana has ever had.

And you can’t draw a 6-0 map without making Steve Scalise go through that. Anything you do to protect Scalise will result in the 2nd District being blue or blue-purple; and anything you do in an effort to mitigate that will result in another district, probably the 6th, becoming too purple for comfort.

You can’t draw a 6-0 map, is the upshot. You can draw a 4-0 map with two purple districts.

And maybe you should, in the sense that it would be better if the public actually had a choice in the country’s direction with swing districts reflecting our preferences.

Except that isn’t how it works. Go and look at how Massachusetts and Illinois and California draw their maps, and the answer is that Louisiana shouldn’t try to make swing districts until those blue states do.

So 5-1 is the smart play. But how exactly to draw a 5-1 map is what will make for a very interesting latter half of the current legislative session.