Gov. Jeff Landry said Thursday that the state could not move forward with its current congressional maps now that the Supreme Court has ruled them unconstitutional, raising the possibility that the state would have to postpone its May primary and draw new maps.
In a joint statement Thursday morning, Mr. Landry and the Louisiana attorney general, Liz Murrill, said that the court ruling prevented the current map, deemed an illegal racial gerrymander, from being used. The two said they were working with lawmakers and the secretary of state to “develop a path forward,” but did not offer details.
With absentee ballots already available and early voting set to begin Saturday ahead of a May 16 primary in Louisiana, the ruling has set off a chaotic scramble as Republicans assess where they can redraw districts for partisan advantage ahead of the fall midterms.
Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a Republican, also weighed in with reporters Thursday morning at the Capitol, saying that Mr. Landry “has no choice but to suspend” House primaries because the map was ruled unconstitutional. Mr. Landry, however, stopped short of an outright decision as state officials continued to examine the complexity and challenges of suspending an impending election.
A new congressional map in Louisiana could undo the creation of at least one majority-Black district, costing Democrats at least one seat in the Congress. That would help Republicans at a moment when they face significant headwinds in their quest to retain control of the House in November.
The court’s ruling on Wednesday declared the entire Louisiana congressional map an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, upending a key tenet of the Voting Rights Act. Democrats and civil rights leaders decried the ruling, which they said would allow for the elimination of majority-Black districts that have been essential in ensuring minority representation in Congress.
“I really think that the Supreme Court has opened a Pandora’s box,” Representative Cleo Fields, the Democrat whose district is at the center of the Supreme Court case, said in an interview Thursday. He said he had urged Louisiana leaders to keep the map in place for the midterm elections, warning against “a hastened decision to move forward.”
Those majority-Black districts in Louisiana and other states have long supported Democratic candidates. Eliminating them could tilt the future balance of partisan control in the narrowly divided House of Representatives.
Some officials close to Louisiana leadership and candidates said discussions were ongoing about the possibility of delaying the House primaries to give lawmakers time to approve a new map. But those officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations, cautioned that plans were still in flux, in part because of legal and logistical questions.
Unlike those in other states, Louisiana’s State Legislature remains in session. Some lawmakers had already filed draft legislation to help speed the process of debating and approving a new map. Any changes to the primary schedule or the congressional map could further scramble and confuse voters, who were already facing a new closed-primary system.
At the Capitol, Mr. Johnson suggested that lawmakers were considering reverting to the state’s longstanding practice of an open primary in November, in which Republicans and Democrats would compete together and the top two vote-getters would advance to a runoff in December.
“That’s the way it was typically done in Louisiana, so far as I’ve been in politics, and looks like that may be the way they’re headed,” Mr. Johnson said. “But again, my fingerprints aren’t on it. It’s the decision of the State Legislature.”
