Louisiana House committee advances congressional map eliminating a majority-Black district

On May 21, 2026, the Louisiana House and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 10-7 along party lines to advance Senate Bill 121, a mid-decade congressional redistricting bill, to the full House. In the same proceeding the committee adopted House Committee Amendment No. 5662, offered by Rep. Dixon McMakin (R-Baton Rouge), which shifted district boundaries in the Capitol and Acadiana regions without altering the map's partisan balance. SB 121, sponsored by Sen. Jay Morris (R-West Monroe) and already passed by the Louisiana Senate, dismantles the majority-Black 6th Congressional District — currently held by Rep. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge — and redraws it as a Republican-leaning seat. The plan reduces the number of majority-Black congressional districts in Louisiana from two to one, leaving the New Orleans-anchored 2nd District, held by Rep. Troy Carter, D, as the lone remaining majority-Black district in a state whose population is roughly one-third Black. It is projected to give Republicans a 5-1 advantage in the state's six-seat U.S. House delegation.

The redraw is a direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's April 29, 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a 6-3 ruling that struck down Louisiana's existing two-majority-Black-district congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and substantially weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The map advanced by the committee would essentially restore the single-majority-Black-district configuration that federal courts had found violated Section 2 in 2022. Sen. Morris stated that the map was drawn to maximize Republican advantage, framing it as lawful partisan redistricting rather than racial discrimination — a distinction the Callais majority enabled by treating the close correlation between race and party in Louisiana as a reason to discount evidence of racial intent. The committee heard more than five hours of public testimony, uniformly in opposition; former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now president of the National Urban League, told the panel the plan amounted to a reversal of racial progress, and committee Democrats argued that in Louisiana the map's partisan and racial effects cannot be separated.

The committee vote is one step in a compressed remapping process driven by a June 1 statutory deadline. SB 121 now moves to the full House; because the committee adopted the McMakin amendment, the Senate would have to concur in those changes or the bill would go to a conference committee, where the chair of the Senate's redistricting committee has signaled objections to parts of the amended map. The Louisiana effort parallels coordinated post-Callais redraws across Southern states, including Tennessee's elimination of a Memphis majority-Black district. Separately, Gov. Jeff Landry suspended Louisiana's congressional primaries the day after Callais to create time for the redraw. Under The Standing's broken-windows principle, the committee's action is recorded as it stands: advancing a mid-decade map drawn to predetermine a 5-1 partisan outcome and to eliminate the second district in which Black voters can elect a candidate of choice is part of the record regardless of whether SB 121 ultimately becomes law.