New map rules from LA case to wash out peak woke

More than just potentially fundamentally reshaping reapportionment jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais may signal that, finally after five tortuous years, peak woke has been jettisoned sufficiently from public policy-making.

Understand that what oozed into larger society during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic had incubated for decades, even more than a century, in academia. What we now call “woke,” or coming to understand the faith that America is systemically and irredeemably racist to the point that, as one of its leading exponents phrased it, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” – in other words, as allegedly subconscious racism against blacks was inevitable despite a stated conscious desire not to be prejudiced against blacks, thus policy had to favor deliberately blacks at the expense of the majority’ supposed oppressiveness, is nothing more than a mutilated Marxism where race replaces class, with both versions equally discredited by the data.

The pandemic allowed government to vastly expand its powers playing upon people’s fears and prejudices during the last year of Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s first term, effectively neutering his agenda as well as setting him up for defeat, then with Democrat former Pres. Joe Biden following in office and courtesy of his rapidly diminishing capacities letting the far left run amok in both policy-making and in pressuring society to follow it. Like an opportunistic disease neo-racism posing as anti-racism metastasized into the nation’s bloodstream.

Court poised to junk LA map, old map thinking

There is no doubt that Louisiana’s current congressional map that jackknifes into it two black majority-minority districts of six will disappear sooner than later, argumentation in front of the U.S. Supreme Court earlier today revealed, but just how little of a role race will play in apportionment going forward remains to be seen when the Court’s ruling on the consolidated Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais comes out.

From the start, the Court majority, those justices picked by a Republican president, unambiguously signaled the current map soon would hit the ash heap, confirming lower court rulings, precisely because of the dominant role race played in its creation. GOP Gov. Jeff Landry successfully urged the Legislature to draw the current map after the Court refused to resolve the conflict between statute (Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act) and the Constitution (the Equal Protection Clause) as to how prominently race could be used to precent potential discrimination by race.

Too far, as the Louisiana case that the Court’s previous ruling impacted demonstrated. In that instance, for the first time ever a court ruled that, despite the actual wording of Section 2, that if a state had a discrete minority population of a certain proportion that the number of seats that were M/M roughly had to correspond to that. This was the logical extension of a bedrock assumption drawn into the jurisprudence of the VRA, that regarding race outcome mattered, not intent, when districts were drawn: if you could maximize the number of M/M or opportunity districts for a plenary body that avoided not having at least a poor argument justifying the ways in which it could violate traditional principles of map-drawing in order to cater to race, you had to maximize.

Edwards acknowledges reality, smacks Democrats

He may be out to lunch on desirable policy preferences and not exactly honest, but Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards knows how to spot whether a campaign is winnable, to the chagrin of Louisiana Democrats and perhaps the delight of Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy.

Edwards bludgeoned the fantasies of some in his party when this week he declared he would not be a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2026. He was the last Democrat to win statewide office, leading to the wild hope that he would enter the race and, as in both his gubernatorial victories in 2015 and 2019, keep out of the way as internecine Republican battles could permit him to sneak into office.

That became a pipe dream when, during his second term, Edwards took off the mask and showed his true leftist ideologue self. He won twice because he was a fraud, trying to convey the impression he was some kind of centrist, even conservative (only in the context of the extremists controlling his party nationally) while governing from left-of-center to the far left, depending on the issue, carrying himself as a blank slate in his first campaign and in his first term keeping in the dark or fooling enough people who didn’t follow closely enough politics to narrowly gain reelection.

Don't sleep on Seabaugh DA victory chances

Don’t write off the chances of Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh to become the next First District Attorney in 2027.

This week, Seabaugh will announce formally that he will purse the job of Caddo Parish district attorney, despite the fact that incumbent Democrat James Stewart, even if getting a bit long in the tooth by the end of the term when he will be approaching 80, shows every sign of seeking reelection. The news was met by some disparaging his chances.

That may not be a good bet. The uphill road that Seabaugh, or any white Republican, has to face is the parish as of late has turned to electing black Democrats, given that voter registration totals in the parish show whites with a majority of about 500 out of nearly 145,000 registrants in he foreground of a history of little black crossover voting but greater, if still small, white crossover voting. Stewart gained the office in a special election in 2015 over a white Republican but was reelected even more comfortably in 2020 over a white Democrat, while the only other parish-wide office focusing on public safety, sheriff, saw in 2024 a narrow win by black Democrat Henry Whitehorn over white Republican John Nickelson.

LA can't guarantee new House map for 2026

Louisiana can increase its chances of having congressional elections occur under new rules for 2026, but there’s no way it can guarantee that given the jurisprudence and timing of elections.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear whether statute and the Constitution conflict on drawing district boundaries. If so decided, that means the state can engage in a mid-cycle reapportionment to return the state to having only one of six majority-minority districts as opposed to two that the state felt forced to implement by previous judicial rulings for 2024.

To permit such a scenario for 2026 elections, the state must change its federal election dates. Already, petitioning for ballot access has begun for party primary elections scheduled Apr. 18, but unless the Court rules relatively quickly that would make changing boundaries to meet existing deadlines impossible. The deadline to turn in a petition to make a party primary ballot is four months prior to the election.