(BATON ROUGE, La.) — Louisiana lawmakers on Friday approved a new congressional map that could allow Republicans to flip one of the state’s two Democratic-held House seats in the 2026 midterms.
The Louisiana Senate gave final approval to a bill with the new map after much dissent from Democrats.
“Y’all, at the beginning of this process, I would have said that we are building a house on a broken foundation. Now, it feels more like quicksand, because we’re in 2026 going into a map that we know is flawed, that we know is going to get struck down,” state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor.
State Sen. Jay Morris, a Republican, defended the map ahead of the final vote.
“I think we have a map here that meets all the traditional redistricting criteria. It’s not racially gerrymandered. … I think it broadly allows for representation for each region of the state, and it’s very fair, and we should approve it,” Morris said.
The new map comes weeks after U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s current map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The landmark Supreme Court decision dealt a blow to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and set off a newfound scramble of mid-decade redistricting in Louisiana and other states that Democrats say could drastically reduce the number of Black representatives in Congress.
On Thursday, during hours of floor debate, several Democratic state representatives condemned the redrawn map, which eliminates one of the two majority-Black districts in the state, as discriminatory.
“I want to ask you to remember the argument that we should now be colorblind about a congressional map, in this state of all states, requires forgetting a quantity of history that I don’t believe any of us has the right to forget. Black people in this country were not citizens; not partial citizens, not second-class citizens. We weren’t citizens at all,” state Rep. Kyle Green, a Democrat and member of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, said on Thursday.
State Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican who sponsored an amended version of the map that the state House approved, argued to members that legislators had been forced to redraw the map because of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“And now we find ourselves back with a similar map to the one this body passed in 2022, that had five Republican districts and one Democrat district,” he said on Thursday. “The map complies with traditional redistricting principles and also maximizes partisan advantage. The map is contiguous; it is compact; it binds communities of interest; it protects incumbency. … Race was not a factor when drawing these districts.”
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