Louisiana Is Redrawing Its Congressional Map. Here’s What the Rules Actually Allow.

LAFAYETTE, La. — Louisiana’s legislature opened public debate Friday on new congressional district lines, the latest chapter in a redistricting fight that has consumed the state for years and ended last week with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that will reshape maps well beyond Louisiana’s borders.

The Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee met Friday to hear public comment after the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais struck down the state’s current six-district congressional map. A vote on a new map is expected early next week.

The politics here are complicated, but the legal rules that govern how these lines get drawn are worth understanding first.

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What the Law Actually Requires When Drawing Congressional Districts

Map-drawing is not a free-for-all. Federal and state law set concrete minimum requirements on any congressional plan Louisiana passes.

At the federal level, the U.S. Constitution’s “one person, one vote” principle requires congressional districts to have nearly equal populations. For congressional seats specifically, courts hold states to a stricter standard than they apply to state legislative maps: population deviations between districts must be as small as practically achievable, typically within fractions of a percentage point.

Louisiana’s Joint Rule No. 21 spells out the state-level criteria. Congressional plans must use single-member districts, must assign all of the state’s geography, and must keep districts contiguous — meaning every part of a district has to physically connect to the rest. Districts cannot jump from one area to another.

On top of those hard floors, the rules describe a set of traditional redistricting principles expected to guide mapmakers: compactness (districts should not take on extreme or irregular shapes without justification), preservation of parish and municipal boundaries where possible, and maintenance of communities of interest — populations that share economic, social, or geographic ties. Those principles are non-binding, meaning the legislature can depart from them, but departures tend to draw legal challenges.

What Lawmakers Can and Cannot Consider

This is where the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling changed things in a real way.

For decades, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required states to draw districts that gave minority voters a meaningful opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, under certain circumstances. That obligation is what led Louisiana to draw two majority-Black districts in its current map.

The Court’s ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito, sharply narrowed that requirement. Under the new interpretation, Section 2 is violated “only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts” to discriminate. That is a higher bar than the previous standard, which only required that a map have the effect of discriminating against minority voters — intent did not have to be proven.

The practical result: race can no longer be the primary driver of how district lines are drawn. A district shaped mainly to achieve a particular racial composition, even as a remedy for past discrimination, is now constitutionally suspect under the Equal Protection Clause.

What stays permissible is drawing districts based on political and partisan considerations. Protecting incumbents, concentrating party voters, and favoring certain political outcomes are still legally defensible rationales. Republican leaders in the legislature argued even before this ruling that politics, not race, drove the 2024 map’s design. That framing carries more weight now.

Partisan gerrymandering, notably, remains unpoliced at the federal level. The Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause held that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims. Louisiana’s constitution does not impose an independent ban on it either.

The Specific Decisions Lawmakers Are Weighing

Louisiana has six congressional seats. The current map includes two majority-Black districts, one of which is the 6th District, drawn in a configuration that stretches from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, picking up clusters of Black voters along the way. That district elected Democrat Cleo Fields in 2024.

With the Supreme Court having thrown out that map, lawmakers are now weighing three basic configurations.

The first is a 5-1 map with five Republican-leaning districts and one majority-Black district anchored in Baton Rouge. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Caleb Kleinpeter, R-Port Allen, told reporters his committee would likely favor this approach, with the surviving majority-Black district built around the existing 6th District. House Speaker Phillip DeVillier, R-Eunice, has pointed to the 2022 map as a model — that version also used a 5-1 split.

The second is a 6-0 map with all six districts drawn to favor Republicans, eliminating both majority-Black districts. President Donald Trump has pushed Republican-controlled legislatures nationwide to maximize GOP House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms, and that pressure is being felt in Baton Rouge. Political analyst Bernie Pinsonat noted this week that the districts from Baton Rouge west and north are all subject to reconfiguration, and that lawmakers will likely draft and compare multiple versions of both maps.

But Kleinpeter cautioned that the 6-0 route carries its own risks. “You can draw a strong 5-1 and be safe, or you can draw a 6-0 that waters down your Republican districts so much that you could possibly have two Democrats or a moderate,” he told the Advocate.

A third option, pressed by Black Democratic members of both chambers and the congressional delegation, would preserve two majority-Black districts. That path now faces steep legal headwinds under the ruling.

The Election Complication

The timing here is genuinely chaotic. Early voting for the May 16 congressional primaries was already underway when the Supreme Court issued its ruling April 29. More than 104,000 people had already cast early ballots as of May 4, according to WAFB.

The day after the ruling, Gov. Landry issued an executive order suspending the U.S. House primary elections, citing the court’s decision. Rep. Cleo Fields joined a lawsuit challenging the suspension, arguing that the election was already underway and that voters were being disenfranchised in the middle of the process.

Congressional races will still appear on May 16 ballots for all other offices. Only the U.S. House races are affected by the governor’s order. New congressional maps must be finalized before the November general election.

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What This Means Beyond Louisiana

Votebeat’s analysis of the ruling notes that while the Court did not strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act outright, it reinterpreted the law in ways that will make future challenges to racially discriminatory maps much harder to bring. States across the South that have relied on majority-minority districts to preserve Black political representation are already reassessing their maps.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the decision “leaves some room for Congress — not much, but some — to correct the court’s understanding” through a legislative update to the Voting Rights Act. That path, though, is uncertain given the current makeup of Congress.

Louisiana’s redistricting fight is now one of the most-watched in the country. The map that comes out of Baton Rouge in the next few weeks will test the new limits the Supreme Court has set — and give other states a template to follow.