Federal judge will draw new Louisiana congressional map after Legislature fails to act

[brooklynite]

Source: Lafayette Daily Advertiser

A federal judge will draw a new Louisiana congressional map with a second Black district after the Legislature failed to draw new boundaries of its own in a Special Session that ended Saturday without the passage of any bill.

Louisiana Middle District U.S. Judge Shelly Dick will now draw her own map for the state from the bench.

Dick, who ruled June 6 that the congressional map passed by lawmakers in February violated the Voting Rights Act because it kept just one majority Black district, had given the Legislature a deadline of June 20 to pass new boundaries or she would take over.

Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder of Gonzales and Republican Senate President Page Cortez had unsuccessfully argued the Legislature needed more time to create a new map, a motion Dick denied in court Thursday.

Read more: https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/2022/06/18/louisiana-congressional-map-judges-hands-after-legislature-fails-act/7668728001/

[ArizonaLib]

1. He should make 4 predominantly black disctricts for good measure.

He can nickname the districts Sasha, Malia, Michelle and Barack.

[Lochloosa]

2. She.

[NBachers]

3. Running out the clock 'till the November election; then they can reset and wait until 2025.

[Roy Rolling]

8. La. Here

Judge Dick won’t tolerate delay. She will draw districts by next week. She threatened the speaker of the La. House with arrest from Contempt of Court for the first laughable redraw Republicans submitted to the court.

Watch this case, Steve Scalise and his Klan of Republican Congressmen are about to get their comeuppance.

I love it.

[cstanleytech]

4. Our country needs a Constitutional Amendment in such a way that it prevents any political party from

every gerrymandering any districts.
That and to make our elected officials work for all the people they serve rather than those of their political party we need a Constitutional Amendment requiring State Senators, Governors and all Federal Senators, House members and the President to win by a 5% wider margin than they won the last time they ran if they wish another term and if they fail to meet that margin the candidate with the next highest margin wins.
Furthermore for that level of office they lost they must wait until 2 full election cycles have been held for that office have been held before they may attempt to run for it anywhere else that way it prevents carpetbagging.
A Governor though is still free to run for another office just as a House member may run for Governor they just cannot run for the same level that they lost until that cool off period has run its course.
Also resigning kicks in the cool off period as well so as to prevent a politician from skirting out from under it.

[iluvtennis]

10. +++ agree. n/t

[The Grand Illuminist]

11. Contact your state reps....

To call for a convention of the states. Because there is no way in hell any future constitutional amendments is going through by traditional means anymore.

[JohnnyRingo]

5. They played the same game in Ohio, but didn't get held to it.

Republicans shut out the 2 democrats on the committee and went in private to produce the maps. A judicial panel denied them three times while republicans said they can't make a fair map (They really said that).

They were threatened by the supreme court to try again or the court would appoint someone else to do it so republicans hired an outside consulting firm that worked openly. Halfway through the repubs dismissed the firm and took over a third time for a map that was as bad as the others.

They were furious that the deciding justice was one of their own but repeatedly denied them.

[cstanleytech]

6. Technically no map is "fair" as fair can depend on a personal opinion to often but

ya I remember reading about the bullshit the Republicans kept pulling up there to try and prevent their party from losing any seats.

[JohnnyRingo]

9. Ohio is a 55/45 split favoring Republicans according to historic votes

Our districts are 12 republicans and 4 democratic.

Ohio will lose one district this year, so Republicans drew a map with one less Democratic district. Eventually, by the third attempt they changed some to "toss up districts", but the ones that favor Dems do so by 2 or three points. The ones they say slightly favor republicans do so with a 21% advantage.

This all started in 2010 when Republicans discovered computers and used them in "Operation Red State" where every state with a republican in charge drew maps to give themselves permanent advantage.

[img][/img]

[NullTuples]

12. I believe it was called Operation Redmap?

And used the 2010 Census to identify the most non-obvious advantageous ways to set district boundaries. Then they pour millions from out of state funders into those races, which normally saw budgets of a few tens of thousands of dollars. Once they had a majority, they kept tightening the district maps until they reached the point we're at now. In many red states, there simply is no way for Dems to ever have a majority in the state legislature or US Congress from those states.

[BumRushDaShow]

7. Same happened here in PA in 2018

and again in 2021 (for the 2020 census redistricting) and like they did in 2018, the state Supreme Court imposed a map, which survived a SCOTUS challenge (where they deferred back to the state due to the state Constitution's interpretation by the state Supreme Court).

In 2018, the re-drawn map lead to the torpedoing of the GOP's extreme gerrymandering of 2011 and transformed the 13 (R) - 5 (D) bullshit to 9 (R) - 9 (D). Since PA lost a seat after the 2020 census, the state Supreme Court kept their same map after rejecting the GOP attempt to skew again, and used the map supported by Marc Elias and the "Fair Maps" org, but tweaking to remove a district and re-balance what was left, leaving a handful of toss-up swing districts currently with Dem incumbents.

I did just spot a recent SCOTUS Blog entry where a former GOP congressman is back to the SCOTUS arguing about the state Supreme Court doing the map again -

Pennsylvania’s congressional map returns to the court
By Kalvis Goldeon Jun 17, 2022 at 5:24 pm

(snip)

Pennsylvania lost a seat in the House of Representatives after the 2020 census, and so was required to draw a new map before the 2022 midterm elections. In January, its Republican-controlled state legislature chose a map that would have resulted in nine Democratic-leaning congressional districts and eight Republican-leaning districts. The state’s Democratic governor vetoed the map. After a flurry of litigation, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in late February voted 4-3 to impose a different map that would favor Democrats in 10 of 17 congressional districts.

On March 7, the justices denied two emergency appeals on the shadow docket to revive the new congressional maps drawn by Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania as well as in North Carolina. Ten days later, Republican challengers in the North Carolina case filed a cert petition; that petition was up for consideration at the justices’ conference this week. Now, a former Republican congressional representative for Pennsylvania has filed a cert petition in his state’s case, urging the justices to grant the two petitions together for full merits review next term.

In Costello v. Carter, former Rep. Ryan Costello asks the court to answer two questions related to the drawing of states’ maps for congressional elections. The first question, also presented in the North Carolina case, regards the independent-state-legislature theory: whether the Constitution’s vesting of state legislatures with the authority to set the “Times, Places, and Manner” of elections in Article I, Section 4 precludes state courts from interfering with the maps or other rules those legislatures set for elections. Four justices (the number it takes to grant a cert petition) indicated that this question deserves the court’s full attention when the court declined to intervene in the North Carolina lawsuit.

Costello also asks the justices to consider whether a separate provision of federal elections law invalidates the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s choosing of a new map in defiance of the legislature. In 2 U.S.C. § 2a(c), Congress laid out the procedures that govern a state’s elections after a census count and before formal redistricting takes place. The statute says that “if there is a decrease in the number of Representatives and the number of districts in such State exceeds such decreased number of Representatives, they shall be elected from the State at large.” Costello argues that, because Pennsylvania’s 18 districts “exceed[ed]” the state’s 17 House seats remaining after the 2020 census, the state court’s map violated the instruction from Congress that the state’s next congressional election be at-large until it “is redistricted in the manner provided by the law thereof after any apportionment.”

(snip)

https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/pennsylvanias-congressional-map-returns-to-the-court/

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

13. I hope this doesn't backfire.

If the new map packs black voters into a few districts gerrymandered to elect more vlack representatives, then the remaining "non-black" districts might be more heavily populated with Republican voters. Packing black (presumed Democratic) voters into a few districts sounds like a Republican gerrymandering dream.

Similar arguments were made about Michigan's redistricting, though it has remained un"corrected".