Unless they get a satisfactory judicial ruling within the next couple of weeks, it looks like Louisiana will end up using its current congressional map, which may challenge Republicans nationally and GOP Gov. Jeff Landry specifically.
The country waits upon the U.S. Supreme Court to decide in Callais v. Louisiana, which fundamentally could change how reapportionment for legislative bodies occurs. The case itself directly addresses Louisiana’s present congressional map, which is built on the assumption that unless the proportion of districts that have a minority-majority (of blacks) is roughly equivalent to the (black) minority proportion in the population (where “black” is defined as someone claiming descendancy from a black person), it is assumed racial discrimination is occurring in the drawing of that map.
Callais challenges the ability of the federal government to use statute (specifically, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act) to enforce this, calling it a contravention of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The Court head the case in October, and when it issues a decision is anybody’s guess.
Some states already have conducted mid-cycle reapportionment in anticipation of a ruling that would invalidate substantially, if not entirely, the relevant law, while others with election calendars having more distant deadlines may do so in the future. Neither option is available to Louisiana over the map it passed in 2024 that undid one that did not follow this proportionality rule as does the present one, because to follow these other states would moot the case that, interestingly, had the state arguing against its own product a few months ago.
Nor can Louisiana wait much longer to make such a move, because of its election calendar. Changed in 2024 for congressional contests, it commences the process earlier than almost every state, even after for just this election it pushed back deadlines in the hopes of catching Court guidance after it decided. Already, the state’s policy-makers are saying it’s now or never for the Court to leave the possibility for a new map for this year’s elections.
But the Court may have decided to take the Solomonic approach to the question. Any significant alteration would constitute a big change, but both to assuage the losers of the case (who want to use the existing interpretation as a means to stuff as many Democrats into legislative organs as possible) by giving them one more congressional election cycle to take advantage of an unconstitutional situation as well as to buy time to make the transition before putting matters to right the Court may delay deciding until the end of June at its term’s conclusion.
If so, this could become problematic for Republicans nationally. The GOP has bumped along with narrow, single-digit House majorities for the last three years and will for the rest of this year. Given the history of nearly a century where the president’s party loses seats in the House in midterm elections except when a president has relatively high popularity (which Republican Pres. Donald Trump does not at present), it will be nip-and-tuck for the party to hold the House majority, and every seat will count. With a new map almost guaranteed to flip a seat from Democrat to Republican, that one seat could prove to be the difference for chamber control.
And this flip would create a huge political problem for Landry. It was he who built the legislative coalition that agreed to junk the previous map with just one instead of the present map’s two M/M districts, citing a need to adhere to a court ruling invalidating the former even though litigation of that case potentially wasn’t finished, although in doing so he teed up a map begging to be challenged legally.
If in fact Democrats find themselves in control of the House at the start of 2027 by a single seat with the present map used, Landry will face a lot of recriminations even though he will have been a major figure concerning the establishment of a constitutional principle that should favor Republicans politically for at least the foreseeable future – just not in the short term. He and the rest of the GOP better hope it doesn’t come to that.
No comments:
Post a Comment