BATON ROUGE — Louisiana’s attorney general on Friday issued four suggestions on how public schools should display the Ten Commandments. One says the document shouldn’t be posted behind any teacher’s desk and another says it should be displayed with other historical documents.

Lawmakers last year directed that a copy of the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom, including those at colleges and universities, beginning Jan. 1. A federal judge in November struck the law down as unconstitutional.

The attorney general’s office has said the judge’s order applies only to five school districts named in a lawsuit challenging the law and that other districts can post the Ten Commandments without violating an order from U.S. District Judge John de Gravelles.

The judge’s order, however, directed the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the state’s education secretary to tell all districts about his decision — not just districts covering students in East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany and Vernon parishes.

“Defendants (Cade) Brumley and BESE Members shall be responsible for providing notice of this order and H.B. 71’s unconstitutionality to all Louisiana public elementary, secondary, and charter schools, and all public post-secondary education institutions,” he wrote.

The American Civil Liberties Union wrote to school districts statewide last month saying that while they were not named defendants in the lawsuit, they could be sued if they didn’t protect the constitutional rights of their students.

“Even though your district is not a party to the ongoing lawsuit, and therefore is not technically subject to the district court’s injunction, all school districts have an independent obligation to respect students’ and families’ constitutional rights. Because the U.S. Constitution supersedes state law, public-school officials may not comply with H.B. 71,” it wrote.

Lester Duhe, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said state lawyers viewed the ACLU letter as giving tacit approval for posting the Ten Commandments.

“Even ACLU’s statement agrees non-parties can comply with the law,” he said this week.

In the guidance provided Friday, the attorney general’s office said that to avoid confusion about whether the display could be attributed to a teacher, “a school should place its displays on any classroom wall other than behind a teacher’s desk, podium or location from which a teacher ordinarily delivers instruction.”

It also said the Ten Commandments should be displayed “among others reflecting educational content, such as those displaying the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance.”

The other suggestions included using one of four sample displays of the Ten Commandments the attorney general’s office provided and ensuring it was large enough to be read.

A court hearing on the challenge to the law is scheduled for Jan. 23.

The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t set a date for when it will hear the challenge against Louisiana’s majority-Black 6th Congressional District as an illegal racial gerrymander, but one invested onlooker has made it clear where she stands on the case in the meantime.

In doing so, she claims Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who’s defending the map, is content to lose the case because it will lead to the removal of the state’s second majority-Black district in Congress. 

It’s an allegation Murrill firmly refutes, despite having strenuously defended a prior map in federal court that had just one majority-Black district.    

Marina Jenkins, executive director for the National Redistricting Foundation, told reporters last week her group’s “friend of the court” brief (as an outside party to the case) filed Dec. 26 calls on the Supreme Court to keep the current map in place.

Her organization, which is aligned with the Democratic Party, maintains politics, not race, factored into the crafting of the new 6th District. Specifically, Louisiana’s Republican leaders decided who would be sacrificed among their GOP congressional incumbents, she said.   

Also, Jenkins suggested that Murrill’s heart might not be in the task of defending the current map. 

Even though Louisiana wants the court to keep the current map in place, she said Murrill and state Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga are trying to undermine the portion of the federal Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, Section 2.    

“The state of Louisiana has presented outlandish arguments intending to undermine precedent on Section 2 claims, going as far as to say that the state has no obligation to comply with federal law and vote dilution claims,” she said, referencing prior cases when Murrill stood behind maps that watered down Black voting strength.

Murrill firmly rejected Jenkins’ claims Thursday when reached by the Illuminator.

“We absolutely disagree with everything that she said,” the attorney general said in an email from her spokesman. “We have vigorously defended this map, and we look forward to continuing to defend the map at the United States Supreme Court.”

Louisiana filed its own brief Dec. 19 that explains why it supports the map, Murrill said.

“Our brief urges the Supreme Court to uphold [the map] and provide clarity to states that, like Louisiana, are forced into endless litigation every time a new census requires redistricting,” the attorney general wrote. 

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A group of non-Black 6th District voters sued in February to throw out the new version of the 6th District state lawmakers had approved the month before. A federal district judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, and the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeal upheld that decision.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal but gave its OK to use its boundaries for the Nov. 5 election. State Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, won his way back to Congress in that race, having previously represented the 4th District from 1993-97. Coincidentally, the federal courts rejected that version of the 4th District because it was deemed an illegal racial gerrymander.

This is not the first time Murrill and the National Redistricting Foundation have crossed paths.

The group, founded in 2017, filed one of its very first lawsuits a year later against Louisiana for its congressional map that had just one majority-Black district out of its six U.S. House seats. The case timed out with the 2020 Census, which required a new round of congressional reapportionment anyway.

The foundation, with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund leading the way, successfully challenged a congressional map approved in 2022 – one that’s Murrill job to defend as attorney general  – with just one majority-Black U.S. House seat in Louisiana. Before that decision could be appealed, its fate became clear in 2023 when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s congressional map that also shorted the state’s Black population. 

At the time, legal analysts said the case for a second Black congressional district in Louisiana was even stronger than Alabama’s. So when Republican Gov. Jeff  Landry took office in January, he and Murrill conceded the court fight over the 2022 map, and state lawmakers then convened for a special session to update the lines for the 6th District.

When state legislators were given options in January, the NAACP and NRF backed a bill that created a more compact majority-Black seat out of the 5th District anchored in Northeast Louisiana and held by U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, R-Start. The GOP-dominated Legislature instead chose to create a 6th District that stretches awkwardly between Baton Rouge and Northwest Louisiana, largely keeping intact Letlow’s district and the 4th District U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Shreveport, represents   

Jenkins was asked why her organization is now defending the new 6th District rather than suing to revive the revised 5th District it originally supported. She said it’s more important for justices to issue a ruling that ends a federal court pattern of “moving the goalposts” on the Voting Rights Act. 

“This has been sort of a nonstop attack against enforcement of voting rights, protections for voters of color,” she said.

Republican attorneys general in other states have followed Louisiana’s redistricting court saga closely. Fourteen of them filed an amicus brief in a separate NAACP LDF lawsuit that argues state lawmakers underrepresented Black voters when they redrew districts for the Louisiana House of Representatives. 

Murrill defended the Louisiana House map and didn’t join her Republican peers in the brief.

NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Jared Evans said at the time the stakes in that case extend well beyond Louisiana. 

“They know that if Section 2 is upheld, there are a lot of states that need to have additional … Black districts in their [state] house maps, but also in the congressional map, in the state school board maps and all of the other political boundaries,” Evans said. 

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Jenkins highlighted another common thread between Louisiana and other states where Republicans have fought to constrain Black voting strength. The outside law firm Murrill has hired to assist the state in its defense, Holtzman Vogel, also defended what Jenkins called “egregious gerrymanders” in political maps for North Carolina and Ohio.

Drew Ensign, the Holtzman Vogel attorney working on Louisiana’s case, previously worked with Landry and Murrill when they led 24 states in a challenge of the Biden administration’s rejection of Trump-era immigration policy.

Jenkins argues further that race and politics are intertwined. While drawing district lines based on racial makeup is illegal, she noted lawmakers are allowed to take politics into account — making the existing 6th District legally sound. 

She contends that the Republican-led Louisiana Legislature and Landry steered the redistricting process to sacrifice Congressman Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge from the 6th District.

Graves had fallen out of favor with Landry after choosing to back business lobbyist and longtime friend Stephen Waguespack in the 2023 governor’s race. He had also lost support from Louisiana’s hardcore GOP sect who viewed Graves as insufficiently supportive of Rep. Steve Scalise’s failed bid for U.S. House speaker. 

“The Legislature had multiple pathways to create a … compliant map, but testimony from legislators showed that the boundaries of the new district were designed with political interests top of mind, specifically the uniquely partisan goal of favoring one incumbent,” Jenkins said, referring to Letlow.

With Republicans now in control of Congress, the outcome of this case isn’t likely to affect whatever momentum the incoming Trump administration builds for at least a couple of years. But if historical election patterns hold true and Democrats attain House control in the 2027 midterms, Louisiana’s two majority-Black seats might be key to that swing.