Beware the wolves at the door…
5th December 2023 · 0 Comments
Louisiana voters have again elected Republicans to the state’s highest offices during the October and November 2023 elections. The governor, attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer are all white Republicans. Add them to the Republican stronghold on the state House, state Senate, and Louisiana’s congressional delegation, and a trifecta of white right-wing officeholders emerges.
So, Louisiana has the same dominant white power structure it has had forever.
How did this happen? Either a majority of voters want Louisiana to stay red – GOP leader Donald Trump carried Louisiana twice with 58 percent of the vote – or Democratic candidates of color didn’t have the means to get out the vote.
The results were predictable. Low voter turnout was forecasted. The primary election turnout was 36 percent. And according to the secretary of state’s website, the general election turnout was worse at 22.5 percent.
Robert Collins, a political science professor, and a Verite News contributor, said voter turnout was acutely low in Democratic precincts in the general election.
Black voters, or more appropriately, Blacks who are registered to vote deserve some of the blame for the Republican sweep. So too does the Louisiana State Democratic Committee and the DNC, for not providing funding and supporting Black statewide candidates equal to the GOP’s support for Republican candidates.
Reckon.com reported that Republicans outspent Democrats. Gov.-elect Landry received $1.2 million from GOP, while gubernatorial candidate Shawn Wilson getting a paltry $28,000 from Democrats.
And let’s not forget the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s right, SCOTUS bears culpability as well.
When a federal district court ruled Louisiana’s maps unconstitutional because they diluted the Black vote, SCOTUS issued an injunction barring the state from using those maps in the 2022 elections.
It was the conservative learning SCOTUS that then allowed the racist maps to be used, refusing to review the combined lawsuit by two groups, who sued the state over the gerrymandered maps until a similar case in Alabama was heard and decided.
It ignored the 2020 Census results showing the increased population of Blacks in Louisiana, and allowed maps drawn as a result of the 10-year-old 2010 Census calculus for the most recent elections.
Whites are 52 percent of the state’s population, and Blacks are one-third of the population, but when you add all ethnic groups together, they are 48 percent of the electorate. Where is fairness and justice for all?
The 2020 Census results indicate that justice may be hidden in the numbers. A Brookings Institute 2021 study showed a decline in white population growth by 1.2 percent from 2000 to 2010 and a -2.6 percent loss (over five million people) for the 2010s. The study pointed to lower fertility rates, immigration, and the continued aging of the white population as reasons for the dwindling population numbers. Fewer births and more deaths resulted in a natural decline, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Simultaneously, a rise in multiracial marriages has young people identifying as mixed-race. This shift, along with growing populations of other non-white races, has led to population gains for these groups.
The Republican-stacked Supreme Court’s excuse that the Louisiana map challenges would not be heard until the Alabama case was decided was a purposeful delay tactic to allow gerrymandered maps favoring white Republicans, who were easily re-elected to Louisiana’s statewide offices, Legislature, and congressional delegation.
Instead of a new, fairer district map with a mandated second majority-minority district, the Republican-run state legislature ignored the lower court’s decision, overrode Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards’ veto of its map, and used the Black voter dilution map, thanks to the white Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s decision to stop the lower federal court’s order.
The Trumpian method of delaying justice was used by the High Court, which Donald J. Trump stacked to get favorable rulings for himself and Republicans.
And who championed and campaigned against the new map, which a coalition of individuals, civil rights and legal organizations had created? None other than Governor-elect Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s former attorney general, whom Trump endorsed. As attorney general, Landry petitioned SCOTUS to put a stay on the lower court’s ruling.
Landry fought against ex-felons’ right to vote, successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court not to make its unanimous jury ruling retroactive, backed a measure making public some confidential juvenile court records for three of Louisiana’s predominantly Black parishes, Caddo, East Baton Rouge and Orleans, and promised to jail abortion providers after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Landry also blocked mass clemency efforts for the state’s 56 death row inmates, 67 percent of whom are Black, reported Reckon.com.
Once in the governor’s mansion, Governor-elect Landry is sure to fast track the state-sponsored murder of Angola Penitentiary’s death row prisoners. The week before Thanksgiving, Rolling Stone magazine exposed Landry’s predilection for executions in an article titled, “Meet Louisiana’s Execution-Happy New Governor.”
“Louisiana’s new governor is one of the fossil fuel industry’s biggest defenders,” Raw Story claimed. The news site criticized Landry for calling climate change a “hoax and defending polluters” on the campaign trail and for supporting the fossil fuel industry, which pollutes the state’s air and erodes its wetlands.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, Landry promised to jail abortion providers. He has said he would tackle crime in urban areas, excluding of course, the crime of air pollution by fossil fuels.
Expect continued erosion on voting rights and civil rights. Unless we step up and wake up people! How many cautionary tales do we have to have to be put before us for us to see the light?
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, not known for ruling in favor of voting rights lawsuits, decided on November 10 that the Louisiana Legislature has until January 15, 2024, to redraw the congressional district map.
If the map is not drawn by then, the lower court should move ahead to a trial to finalize a map in time for the 2024 elections. The panel says the court could give “limited additional time” to lawmakers, but the map must be in place no later than May, which legislators say is the deadline for enacting the map for the 2024 election.
In September, the state complained that the district court had not “afforded the legislature a meaningful opportunity” to prepare a remedial plan. The plaintiffs replied that the Legislature had clearly stated it didn’t want to reconsider its map. They quoted House Speaker Clay Schexnayder as saying a new session was “unnecessary and premature until the legal process is played out in the court systems.”
In September, the Texas attorney general used a legal rule to supersede state district judges’ orders. The Texas move is interesting because the Texas attorney general, oddly enough, echoed Schexnayder’s words…. that action shouldn’t be taken ‘until the legal process is played out…”
In February, the Mississippi House voted to create an unelected, separate, state-appointed court system within majority-Black Jackson. The right to elect judges has not been taken away in any other state area except for Hinds County, where Black residents make up 75 percent of the population.
States are trying to rob their Supreme Courts of constitutional powers.
And maybe go even further. A three-judge panel in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision by U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, who ruled in February 2022 that only the head of the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney general could bring Section 2 lawsuits, NPR reports.
Rudofsky used this bogus excuse in his dismissal of an Arkansas redistricting case brought by advocacy groups representing Black voters in the state.
Of course, the case is headed to SCOTUS. This move is part of the Republican strategy of delay. By the time it gets to SCOTUS, it may be too late to redraw the congressional map for the Arkansas 2024 elections.
Nonetheless, considering recent rulings, could it be that the SCOTUS’ Republican supermajority sees the wolves or, at the very least, smells a rat? How long will it be before congressional officials from red states attempt to nullify SCOTUS rulings?
We don’t need to wait and see. It was Abraham Lincoln who said, “ things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”
Those who seek justice must unite and continue the fight. Remember, a voteless people is a hopeless people.
This article originally published in the December 4, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
