Two Black Congressional seats? Redistricting forum leaves unanswered questions
18th January 2022 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
It is called “the roadshow.” For the last three months, key players in the upcoming redistricting legislative session have traveled around the state on a “listening tour,” and here in the Crescent City on January 5, they got an earful at their third-to-last public meeting at the University of New Orleans’ University Center.
Republican activists at the redistricting forum faced off against African-American advocates of greater representation, each making their cases to the panel on how the state’s Legislative, Congressional, Board of Elementary & Secondary Education, and Public Service Commission districts should be reconstituted.
Not much time remains to draw the new lines for the state’s districts, thanks to population shifts and migration patterns outlined by the 2020 Census, especially as Congressional elections loom. The Special Legislative Session convenes February 1-20, 2022 for this purpose. The State House and Senate are legally mandated to put new electoral maps in place by the end of the year, in preparation for the 2023 races. However, redrawn Congressional districts have to be fully approved almost immediately – certainly by the end of the special session – in time for the fall midterm elections. Moreover, Louisiana’s Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards must be in agreement with any deal, and that is the proverbial rub. African-American activists across the state – and particularly at the UNO “roadshow” event – desire a second Black-majority congressional district, as does Edwards. Two African-American seats out of the six would more fully reflect the 1/3 of Louisiana that is Black.
“This whole process is about fairness. It’s about equity. It’s about public input,” said NAACP Defense Fund attorney Jared Evans at the forum. The two lawmakers who have chaired the “roadshow” also lead the House & Governmental Affairs Committee, which spearheads the chamber’s redistricting work: Crowley GOP Chairman John Stefanski and New Orleans Democrat Vice Chairman Royce Duplessis. Stefanski noted that he and his colleagues are keenly aware of Edwards’ backing of the creation of a second majority-minority U.S. House district – as an issue of fairness. What Edwards will do with his veto pen “is a huge consideration” for the legislative debate, the GOP House & Governmental Affairs Chairman admitted.
Left unsaid by both men was the fact that the creation of a second Black district would eliminate one sitting La. Republican member of Congress. When the GOP is only four seats away from control of the U.S. House of Representatives, and therefore, only four seats away from Steve Scalise becoming House Majority Leader, such a redistricting change in the (current) GOP Whip’s home state stands as no simple matter.
Plus, a practical challenge exists in the creation of a second Black-majority district, the danger of excessive gerrymandering. One can relatively easily construct two Democratic congressional districts in Louisiana, especially since population shifts to the south will likely demand that North Louisiana loses one of its two (partial) congressional seats. Simply draw two giant circles around New Orleans and Baton Rouge. If the La. Legislature opted to center congressional districts around EBR or Orleans parishes, and then add minority portions of inner suburbs to get to 500,000-person threshold (such as African-American majority precincts in WBR, Iberville or Ascension in the former case and Jefferson, Plaquemines or St. Bernard in the latter), the State House and Senate could create Democratic-leaning congressional seats rather easily, without much gerrymandering. In other words, it would not take much effort to draw plurality-to-(bare)-majority African-American electorates in these new U.S. House districts as well. Nevertheless, the supermajorities of minority voters needed to guarantee the election of African-American congressmen in both seats still would remain absent, unless the legislature designs very weirdly serpentine-like district lines stretching across the breadth of Louisiana.
A similar gerrymandering challenge confronts them in the creation of new lines for Louisiana’s legislative seats. In order to guarantee that 1/3 of the districts in the State House and Senate would elect African-American legislators, not only would these seats possess odd shapes, but virtually every white Democratic seat in Louisiana would cease to exist as a result. Legislators like Uptown’s State Rep. Aimée Adatto Freeman argues that Democrats like her represent geographically cohesive, easy to understand districts – where her constituents share much in common. (Her district essentially stretches from Napoleon Avenue to the Orleans Parish-line and from the river to Broadmoor – essentially a giant rectangle of similar neighborhoods.)
Moreover, the creation of 1/3 African-American seats likely would correspondingly result in a gerrymander of a 2/3 majority of safe Republican seats in the State House and Senate. That’s the subtext of the redistricting debate. In the past, Black Democrats have partnered with Caucasian Republicans to bolster their own respective representations at the expense of white Democrats. It could happen again, and that debate might affect any major changes in the nature of the congressional districts.
Most importantly, Edwards has not directly promised to veto a map which does not achieve a 33 percent African-American representation in the legislature. Nor has he drawn a line in the proverbial sand that there must be two Black-majority congressional seats, no matter what.
Put another way, the Democratic Governor might be willing to make a deal. It also remains questionable whether the majority-Republican Legislature would agree to sacrifice a safe GOP district (and the near-certain ouster of a Republican incumbent in Congress), regardless of what outside organizations advocate and whatever maps they submit to “the roadshow.”
Still, at a Council for a Better Louisiana (C.A.B.L.) forum last fall, just prior to their statewide tour, Stefanski and Duplessis both denied they would ignore the public’s comments, and map proposals submitted to them, as they traveled Louisiana to hold these “roadshow” hearings about redistricting.
“I’m taking everything I learn there very seriously,” the Crowley Republican declared in September, Yet, while Duplessis seemingly agreed stating, “We are going to listen to what the public has to say”, the New Orleans Democrat also acknowledged there exists an “inherent flaw in the process” where lawmakers draw their own districts and “self-preservation is a human trait.”
The pressure intensified last week when the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Urban League of Louisiana, and former BESE member Linda Johnson, of Plaquemine cited the need to increase the number of minority seats on the Board of Elementary & Secondary Education from two to three. “Nearly half of Louisiana residents under the age of 18 and eligible to attend public schools in the state or will be in coming years are Black or Latino, but Black and Latino Louisianans are severely underrepresented on the BESE,” the groups said in their statement. “Current maps deny voters of color in northern Louisiana a meaningful opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” they added.
However, this fight has happened before. Ten years ago, legislators failed to agree on a plan to increase BESE minority district representation during a special session. The fight dragged on for so long that the current boundaries eventually passed almost unanimously, winning approval in the House 94-0 and Senate 33-1 in April 2011.
One more “roadshow” event remains prior the February Legislative Special Session on Redistricting. Stefanski, Duplessis, and other panel members will present themselves for public comment on January 20 at 11 a.m. at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge.
This article originally published in the January 17, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
