'Unnecessary surrender': Johnson wants lawmakers to ignore judge’s order to create Black district

A federal judge recently ordered the Louisiana legislature to draw a new Congressional district map that includes a new majority-Black district to accommodate the Bayou State's sizable population of Black voters. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) thinks there's a way around it.

Newly elected Republican Governor Jeff Landry recently convened a special session for the legislature to submit a new map that includes the new district. According to the Shreveport Times, however, Johnson is urging lawmakers in his home state to simply ignore the judge's ruling and keep the current map, which has five Republican districts and one Democratic district.

"We’ve just seen, and are very concerned with, the proposed Congressional map presented in the Louisiana Legislature. It remains my position that the existing map is constitutional and that the legal challenge to it should be tried on merits so the State has adequate opportunity to defend its merits," Johnson posted to his campaign X/Twitter account on Tuesday. "Should the state not prevail at trial, there are multiple other map options that are legally compliant and do not require the unnecessary surrender of a Republican seat in Congress."

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Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill agreed with Johnson, but stated that the hands of Gov. Landry and the Louisiana legislature were effectively tied due to US District Judge Shelly Dick's order.

"As lead counsel for the past year on this matter in the courts of appeal, I agree with the Governor that we have exhausted all reasonable and meaningful avenues for legal remedies available to us," Murrill said. "Now, we have a federal judge holding her pen in one hand and a gun to our head in the other."

Johnson's opinion on the court order may be due to the fact that he himself represents a district that has benefited immensely from racially motivated Republican gerrymandering efforts. A University of Notre Dame study found that Johnson's district benefited disproportionately from the practice of "packing" and "cracking," in which predominantly Black communities — which tend to vote for Democrats — are "cracked" apart in the redistricting process and then "packed" into majority-Republican areas as a means of diluting their vote.

Aside from Louisiana, the federal judiciary has also gotten involved in redistricting battles across the Deep South. In Alabama, the majority-conservative Supreme Court of the United States ruled that lawmakers had to draw a new majority-Black district, as a previous map was found to have unjustly disenfranchised the state's Black voters.

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