With election just months away, Louisiana awaits ruling on Congress map, Black district

Louisiana’s incumbent representatives and their voters are on pins and needles as they await a federal three-judge panel’s ruling on whether the state’s new congressional map that created a second Black district will stand after a three-day trial in Shreveport on a lawsuit challenging the boundaries ended Wednesday.

At stake are the political careers of the incumbents and scope of representation for the state’s Black voters, who represent about one-third of the population but until now had only one of the state’s six congressional districts in which they held a majority with the Nov. 5 election less than seven months away.

Plaintiffs argued that the map passed by the state Republican Legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry should be overturned because they contend its boundaries were gerrymandered solely based on race to create a second Black district.

The lawsuit challenging the map attacks the new majority Black 6th Congressional District boundaries stretching from Baton Rouge to Lafayette to Alexandria to Shreveport as unconstitutional, saying they don’t meet traditional redistriction principles like compactness and preserving communities of interests.

But the state contends additional factors drove the map, including the politics of protecting powerful incumbent Louisiana Republicans U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (4th District), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (1st District) and Julia Letlow (5th District), a member of the Appropriations Committee that controls the country’s pursestrings.

Doing so put Republican U.S. Rep. Graves, the current 6th District congressman, in peril by dismantling his boundaries in favor of a majority Black voter population.

Graves has insisted the map is unconstitutional and predicts it will be overturned by the federal court.

But even though it’s Graves’ career in Congress that is most at risk, the other incumbents will also have to run in new boundaries in the Nov. 5, 2024 presidential and congressional elections if the map holds.

Meanwhile, voters also await final word on what district they will live in and whether Black voters will keep their hard-fought chance to double their representation in Congress.

Democratic Louisiana Sen. Royce Duplessis of New Orleans and Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis were the final two witnesses for the defense Wednesday in support of the map.

“I was proud when Gov. Landry said he was going to do the right thing and very proud in the bipartisan vote for the map that is current law,” Duplessis said, testifying he believes the map to be fair and that political considerations also drove the boundaries of the map.

But previous witnesses for the defense testified that there was a single-minded effort to draw the new map on race alone.

“The racial component was the fundamental tenet,” Republican Shreveport state Sen. Thomas Pressly testified Monday. “We were told we had to have two African-American districts. Otherwise the court would draw the map for us.”

The lawsuit is just the latest litigation challenging the state’s congressional boundaries.

Late last year a federal appeals court upheld Baton Rouge Middle District Judge Shelly Dick’s earlier ruling requiring Louisiana’s congressional map be redrawn to include a second majority Black district out of six to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Those rulings sprang from the efforts of civil rights and voting rights groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU and others who have been logging court battles for two years seeking a second Black majority district.

Attorneys for those groups, known as intervenors, joined with the state attorneys in defending the current map during this week’s federal trial.

Attorneys for both groups told USA Today Network they hope the judges will issue a ruling within a week, but there is no deadline.

The three-judge panel includes Carl Stewart, a Bill Clinton appointee from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and Robert Summershays and David Joseph, both Donald Trump appointees from the U.S. Western District.

More: Trial begins in Shreveport on whether Louisiana’s new Black congressional district is legal

More: Testimony: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry wanted Rep. Garret Graves out in new congress map

Greg Hilburn covers state politics for the USA TODAY Network of Louisiana. Follow him on Twitter @GregHilburn1.