{"id":672613,"date":"2026-05-29T18:10:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T18:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/672613\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T18:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T18:10:14","slug":"louisiana-passes-new-congressional-map-dismantling-one-majority-black-district","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/672613\/","title":{"rendered":"Louisiana passes new congressional map, dismantling one majority-Black district"},"content":{"rendered":"

Louisiana Republicans approved a new congressional map Friday, eliminating one of the state\u2019s two majority-Black districts and drawing an additional Republican-leaning district in its place.<\/p>\n

\"NBC<\/p>\n

Subscribe to read this story ad-free <\/p>\n

Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.<\/p>\n

\"arrow\"<\/p>\n

The map, which is expected to help elect five Republicans and one Democrat to Congress, was passed out of the state Senate Friday afternoon after being tweaked in the state House earlier in the week. Republicans currently have a 4-2 advantage in Louisiana\u2019s House delegation.<\/p>\n

Legislators drew the new lines in response to a major U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana v. Callais<\/a>, which found the existing congressional map in Louisiana to be a racial gerrymander and further weakened the Voting Rights Act. <\/p>\n

The map preserves one Black-majority district that snakes from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and is expected to be challenged by voting rights advocates. A third of Louisiana\u2019s population is Black.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a map here that is meets all the traditional redistricting criteria, it\u2019s not racially gerrymandered,\u201d said Republican state Sen. Jay Morris, who authored the bill. \u201cI feel like it\u2019s going to be very defensible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republicans stressed during hours of debate and discussion that they focused exclusively on partisanship, seeking to increase GOP representation in Congress. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe focused on the Democrat numbers, not the racial numbers when drawing,\u201d said state Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican leading the map drawing for the party in the House. \u201cWe focused in this case on partisanship, which is what Callais said, and I mentioned in my intro, is clearly permissible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, with partisanship and race closely linked in the South, Democrats protested the racial impact of a partisan map. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are being asked to take one of two minority opportunity districts in this state \u2014 where Black Louisianians are nearly one-third of the population \u2014 and to reduce that minority opportunity representation to a single seat out of six, from 33% of the population to 16% of the representation members,\u201d Democratic state Rep. Kyle Green Jr. said during debate on Thursday. \u201cThat\u2019s not a map, that\u2019s a math problem with the moral answer, and the answer is no.\u201d <\/p>\n

Louisiana delayed its House primaries that were originally scheduled for May 16 to give state lawmakers time to redraw congressional maps there following the Supreme Court order, discarding some 40,000 votes that had been cast in primaries already. <\/p>\n

The map is likely the last one implemented by a state legislature ahead of the 2026 election, as primary season is well underway across the country. Still, litigation is likely to continue for years.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump kicked off an unusual mid-decade redistricting frenzy last year, urging Republican-led states to redraw their maps to shore up his party\u2019s slim House majority.<\/p>\n

Democrats responded in kind in several states, but a series of court rulings \u2014 the Callais ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court and the Virginia Supreme Court\u2019s decision to block a Democratic gerrymander there \u2014 gave Republicans a major boost. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Louisiana Republicans approved a new congressional map Friday, eliminating one of the state\u2019s two majority-Black districts and drawing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":["post-672613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}