The special session on pushing 2026 election dates back a month was done and dusted this past week after just a few days. But it seemed to last forever because of caterwauling by Democrats seeking to distort and obfuscate the issue, using false alarmism to shore up their deteriorating political position.
For the supermajority Republicans in the Legislature and GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, it was all pro forma: as the U.S. Supreme Court looks extraordinarily likely to declare invalid the current congressional map – one that Landry prodded the Legislature to accept in a way that favored Democrats because of a court declaration (then still in dispute and not close to being resolved) that the previous version was unconstitutional – the majority wanted to buy more time to draw a new and constitutional map. That’s all it did.
But legislative Democrats disingenuously tried to equate new election dates with something beyond the state merely giving itself the best chance to be in constitutional compliance, in asserting changing dates meant that the Republican majority was trying to bring representational matters back to the point they had been prior to the current map – having gone from one of six districts being majority-minority to two, that this would be junked in reversion to a map with just one M/M district or even zero. This cynically conflated the issue of constitutional compliance with reapportionment politics: the former stands independently of the latter, even if the latter depends upon the presence of the former.
This sleight-of-hand was designed to present an opportunity to propagate a partisan propaganda agenda to shore up power. Democrat legislators inside and outside (along with other co-partisans and special interest allies) of the chambers alleged the date change as an existential threat to black America, conjuring up a fantasy world where the date change mutated into a nationwide supposed subjugation just because maps wouldn’t be drawn according to race. Their rhetoric suggested demand for white sheets would go through the ceiling and coughing fits would abound from smoke thick enough to cut with a knife from the multitude of crosses burning if the date change went through.
It's a hyperbolic tactic several decades old and having nothing to do with reality back into last century: scare the living daylights out of blacks in the mass public using incredibly exaggerated, if not totally false, tales that hyper-discrimination, if not an outright return to slavery, would come to pass if anybody but Democrats, preferably black Democrats, were in office. These dishonest demagogues will peddle whatever lies and mischaracterizations they can to stay in power by presenting themselves as saviors from these presumed perfidies against black folk.
And the reason they resorted to this general line of attack is they can see the trope of black America under attack from anybody who disagrees with them is losing its grip over a growing portion of black America, and perhaps especially so in Louisiana. If it’s not Republican Pres. Donald Trump picking up 15 percent of the black vote in 2024, or twice or more recent historical numbers for GOP candidates, it’s the state’s second, third, fifth, and sixth largest cities with black populations at parity or greater than white populations all electing white mayors – two Republicans, one Democrat, and an independent – as harbingers that the narrative is losing its effectiveness as a tool to grab votes.
For example, it’s no accident that one of the most voluminous windbags flogging the meme of let-dates-change-now/invite-back-Jim-Crow-next was Democrat state Sen. Sam Jenkins. Word on Shreveport streets is he’ll serve up a black Democrat challenge to white Republican Mayor Tom Arceneaux, and, if so, undoubtedly with thinly-disguised exhortations about how he has to win or else black people won’t get a fair shake.
It's the usual black Democrat playbook chock full of misleading deception, magnified by the panic that it’s not working as well as it has been, mandating that the rhetoric get dialed up a notch to compensate. That why we heard so much distortion coming from Louisiana Democrats and their hangers-on about a simple date change designed to maximize the chances that the state stays in constitutional compliance, if possible and necessary by a timely Court decision.
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