All over the map

Forbidden: gerrymandering to protect historically disadvantaged voters. Allowed: gerrymandering to further empower the already powerful.

NEW ORLEANS — Lost amid the cheers of Republicans and anguished cries of Democrats over the Supreme Court’s apparently fatal assault on the Voting Rights Act is recognition of one simple fact that is emblematic of the farcical nature of Louisiana politics.

Louisiana’s current congressional district map, the one the court voted 6-3 to eviscerate, is not really a racial gerrymander. Or, at least, it’s not a racial gerrymander nearly so much as it is a political gerrymander — an instrument of political protectionism and vengeance pushed by a governor aligned with the retribution wing of the Republican Party.

THE SLASH

District 6 in the newly voided map looks like someone took a knife to the state and made a diagonal slash. It ties together pockets of Black population from northwest, central and southeast Louisiana. It was drawn up while the state was still under court pressure to create a second minority district, to better reflect Louisiana’s racial makeup (a.k.a the good ol’ days).

And it did indeed play into arguments that the state couldn’t really draw up a sensible mostly Black district because the Black population of Louisiana was too geographically spread out.

IT DIDN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY

Lost in much of the debate back in 2022 was the fact that proponents of more reasonable and fair Black representation in Congress had proposed sensible maps with carefully considered, compact districts. Proposals included, for instance, a new mostly Black, 5th District. Like the current, mostly white 5th District, the proposed district was bordered on the north by Arkansas. It encompassed northeastern parishes along or near the Mississippi line and made the same sharp eastern turn that the state’s border makes at West Feliciana Parish.

It was a simple, compact and sensibly drawn district that remedied the unfairness of having one third of the state’s population represented by one sixth of the state’s U.S. House delegation.

But sensible and fair don’t get a lot of consideration these days.

PROTECT AND AVENGE

While sensible and fair, the map would have scrambled districts for incumbent Republicans. And Gov. Jeff Landry wanted to protect GOP allies in the delegation.

Except for one.

The map he pushed — the current, freshly killed one that makes Louisiana’s congressional district map look like a Freddy Krueger victim — aligned with court mandates for a new mostly Black district while effectively eliminating incumbent Republican Rep. Garret Graves’ chance at re-election. Graves had backed a Republican opponent of Landry in the last governor’s race.

If you want to make an argument against racial gerrymandering, an argument that creating a second Black-majority district requires ill-advised linking of geographically and culturally diverse parts of the state, you could easily point to the Landry-backed map (which Landry eventually decided NOT to defend in court after Graves was defeated and the Supreme Court appeared poised to gut the VRA).

But, if you want to make an argument for fairness, the unused maps show that Louisiana’s Black population wasn’t so dispersed that a sensible map couldn’t be drawn. That lends weight to the argument that, for years, Louisiana had purposely divided up its Black vote.

WHAT NEXT?

Should proponents of fairness push such a map again in the Legislature? Yes.

It will be defeated, of course. And the Supreme Court majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito appears to shut the door on the argument that the state has to draw a racially fair map just because it can. (In the farcical world of national politics, gerrymandering to protect a historically disadvantaged group of voters is forbidden but partisan gerrymandering to further empower the already powerful is OK.)

But, for history’s sake, let’s make our lawmakers go on the record as opposing the idea of racial fairness.

ANY HOPE?

To be clear, the demise of the Voting Rights Act is not good. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say current predictions of disaster may be a little overwrought and premature. Maybe.

Why? Because I remember back in the 1990s when Louisiana state Rep. Peppi Bruneau, a white Republican, and state Rep. Sherman Copelin, a Black Democrat, worked together on reapportionment maps after the 1990 census.

God knows the two were not allies. But their purposes aligned. Copelin wanted to create more predominantly Black districts. Bruneau wanted more white, mostly Republican districts to bolster the GOP’s growing power in a state that was once almost monolithically Democratic.

In a 2022 article in The Advocate, political writer Tyler Bridges noted the case to be made for the argument that packing more Black voters together into mostly Black districts diminished chances for white Democrats to get elected and contributed to polarization of the electorate.

We can only hope now that the decimation of the Voting Rights Act will lead to the creation of new alliances, perhaps diminishing polarization, perhaps blunting the power of the rabid right.

STILL WITH ME?

I firmly believe that the incompetence and buffoonery of the Trump administration is so overwhelming, with new outrages happening daily, that the electorate is becoming inured to it all.

The website Tangle is providing a much-needed wake-up call . And it’s providing it without a paywall.

It’s a breakdown of the staggering ethical abuses and self-dealing of the president.

In case you’re not familiar with Tangle, it’s a news site where the editors do a deft daily wrap-up of current news, with links to commentary from left and right. There is a free newsletter and more in-depth coverage behind a paywall, but, again, they’ve dropped the paywall for this one.

An excerpt from editor Isaac Saul:

“…There’s so much news, and so many allegations about Trump that it becomes easy to tune it all out (both for his supporters and critics). News fatigue is real, and when we consume the news we are often fed content from organizations and individuals that share our politics.

“But, to state it plainly: After reviewing the evidence of the first 15 months of President Trump’s second term, I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.”