Louisiana Republicans approved a new congressional map on Friday which would eliminate a majority-Black congressional district that was at the center of a landmark supreme court ruling gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The new map reconfigures the state’s sixth congressional district, now represented by Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat. Lawmakers drew the district in 2024 after a court found the map lawmakers enacted after the 2020 census diluted the influence of Black voters and violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The new map will probably give Republicans control of five of Louisiana’s six congressional seats (the previous map had a 4-2 Republican-Democrat split). The bill now goes to Louisiana’s Republican governor, Jeff Landry, who is expected to sign it.
“It does exactly what it was designed to do: consolidate white political power by cracking Black communities apart and drowning their votes in Republican-dominated districts,” said the Louisiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the new map. “The communities targeted by this map – Black voters in Baton Rouge, in Shreveport, along the corridor that Rep. Cleo Fields has represented – did not stay quiet. They showed up at the Capitol in the middle of the night. They testified for hours into the early morning. They made their voices heard at every step of a process designed to minimize their input. That resistance is not over.”
The creation of Fields’s district prompted a lawsuit from a group of white voters in Louisiana, who said that voters were unlawfully sorted by their race. The case, Louisiana v Callais, eventually went to the supreme court, which ruled 6-3 in favor of the plaintiffs. The case set a new, near impossible standard for plaintiffs in Voting Rights Act cases, requiring them to prove intentional discrimination in order to win a redistricting lawsuit.
After the supreme court’s ruling in late April, Landry took the extraordinary step of declaring an emergency to cancel the state’s congressional primary, in which ballots had already gone out. He rescheduled the election to later this year.
Louisiana is one of three Republican-led states in the south that have moved aggressively after the supreme court’s ruling to eliminate majority-Black districts and add Republican-leaning ones. Tennessee and Alabama have also sought to get new maps in place that add Republican-friendly districts.
