Louisiana lawmakers gave final approval on Friday to a new congressional map that would eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, making it the second Southern state to draw and approve carving out such a district since the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act last month.
The new map is Louisiana’s response to the court’s ruling, which rejected its previous congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander. After delaying the state’s U.S. House primaries and negotiating for weeks, the Republican-controlled Legislature settled on redrawing the district at the center of the ruling in a way that reduces the number of Black voters who live in it and hands Republicans a structural advantage ahead of the November midterms.
The State Senate approved the map 28 to 10 on Friday afternoon, a day after a House vote that fell almost completely along party lines. Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, is expected to sign it into law. Primary elections for the state’s six U.S. House seats have been pushed to Nov. 3, about six months later than all of the other primary elections in the state.
Representative Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat whose district was eliminated, has not definitively said whether he will run in a new district that favors Republicans.
When the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, it raised the bar to bring a discrimination claim under the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights law that was passed in 1965 to protect minority voters. It also prompted Republican-led legislatures across the South to debate whether and how to carve up majority-Black districts held by Democrats that had previously been shielded under the law.
