Gov. John Bel Edwards tossed a political hot potato back to the state Legislature last week when he vetoed the lawmakers’ proposed congressional district boundaries for the decade ahead.
The governor said in a news release March 9 that he had vetoed the congressional redistricting map drawn up by the state Legislature because it failed to add a second majority-minority district.
Currently, among the state’s six congressional districts, only one – the 2nd Congressional District stretching from the Baton Rouge area to New Orleans – has a Black majority. Black voters in the state now make up 31.2% of the electorate, representing a third of the voting-age population, according to data cited by Edwards.
“Instead of accounting for this increase in population, the Legislature preserved the status quo and enacted a map where Black voters in five of the six congressional districts are deprived of the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice,” the governor said in a letter to the House speaker, Clay Schexnayder.
Edwards also said he would allow maps drawn up for state legislative districts to become law without his signature and that he would sign into law the proposed district boundaries for the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Louisiana Public Service Commission.
State lawmakers now have to decide if there are enough Republican votes to override Edwards’ veto of the congressional districts. A failure to override could lead the parties and interest groups to take the issue to the court system.
“I don’t think they have the votes,” Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, told the Louisiana Record. “The governor has proved effective in the past in defeating attempts to override a veto.”
The state Senate might be able to deliver the 26 votes necessary to override the congressional-district veto, according to Cross, but Republicans likely won’t get enough votes in the House to overturn the Democratic governor’s rejection.
“As a result, I believe that this will end up being resolved in litigation,” he said, adding that the issue would likely be decided by the federal court system.
Republicans may try to prevail by arguing that creating two majority-minority districts would require a very slim majority – in the 54% range, according to Cross. That may not be enough to increase the state’s minority representation in Congress, GOP lawmakers have suggested.
The state Senate president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.