Mayor-elect Helena Moreno declared last week, “The city of New Orleans should not, and I will not stand for, having a (state) fiscal administrator come in."
Hy and Christopher discuss Gov. Jeff Landry’s proposal that he has the power to appoint a budgetary Tsar over local finances. Does it carry about as much legitimacy as his idea that President Trump should appoint the next LSU football coach?
Both agree that the Governor’s opinion that a tribune of his should hold power over local finances might have carried a little more weight if he had done everything in his power to kill an emergency $125 million bond issue so that the City of New Orleans could pay its employees through Christmas. Due to his opposition, the city withdrew its request from the state bond commission.
Politics operates by the golden rule; he has the gold makes the rule. The taxpayers of New Orleans will pay the price if their police and fire and critical city employees are laid off at the holidays. They have elected a new Mayor and Council. Should the new team have the right to make these decisions, as they will experience, the fallout of budget cuts or tax increases?
Perhaps the Governor’s newfound interest in Orleans finances has more to do with the fact that his poll numbers have fallen into historic lows, way below the President’s. A new statewide poll finds Donald Trump’s favorable rating in Louisiana stands at 48%, but Governor Jeff Landry’s has fallen to only 39% JMC Analytics and Polling pollster John Couvillon says Landry had an aggressive legislative agenda during his first year in office and that might have turned off a few voters. Beating up on New Orleans always ranks as a great way to turn North Louisiana voter opinion back in one’s favor.
Hy and Christopher also ponder if Gov. Jeff Landry led advocates of a second Black-majority district into a trap? By encouraging then-state Senator Cleo Fields to draw a serpentine-shaped district from Baton Rouge to Shreveport—almost impossible to drive across without transversing dirt roads through swamps—the Governor may have not only given the conservative-majority Supreme Court an excuse to strike the current LA 6th Congressional seat out of existence, but every other majority-minority US House district in the nation as well.
In oral arguments one month ago, Justice Samuel Alito largely questioned the specifics of Louisiana’s case and whether the lower courts had faithfully applied the court’s existing Section 2 framework, which requires a minority group to show it is sufficiently large and geographically compact enough to form a majority in a new district.
After lower courts ruled Louisiana’s map with only one majority-Black district violated Section 2, the state added a second one by creating a narrow path stretching from Baton Rouge in the southern part of the state to Shreveport, near its northwestern corner. This oddly redesigned 6th Congressional seat has drew objections ever since.
“There’s a big difference, and there’s a serious question about whether the Black population within the district in question in the illustrative map was geographically compact,” Justice Alito noted.
It is not as if Louisiana had not had a congressional seat struck down for exactly this reason, part of the reason Cleo Fields left Congress nearly three decades ago in the first place. Louisiana's 8th congressional district (which Fields represented from January 3, 1993, to January 3, 1997) was known for its unusual, "Z" shape. Created after the 1990 census, it connected a large and diverse geographic area of Louisiana, including a mix of urban and rural areas as well as stretching east and west of Baton Rouge and up the Mississippi River towards the Arkansas border. When Louisiana lost a congressional seat due to relative population declines following the next census, US Justice Department lawyers thought the 8th looked so odd that the state was allowed to drop this minority-majority seat rather than one of the Caucasian majority districts.
When one adds to the fact that even prior to the current phase of Louisiana’s legal battle reaching the US supreme Court, some members of the conservative majority have long endorsed broad changes to the court’s Section 2 approach. If Louisiana had followed the recommendations of most civil rights lawyers to draw new 6th District from Baton Rouge to Monroe along the Mississippi river, linking geographically connected rural communities with a more “ natural” African-American majority, Louisiana’s case may have received a more skeptical reception by the Justices.
Instead, in all likelihood, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will use Louisiana’s salamander-shaped congressional seat— the very original definition of a gerrymander— as the justification to eliminate the mandate for all majority-minority seats, and then southern “red state” legislators will engage in a smorgasbord of redistricting to produce Donald Trump five more congressional seats, and therefore, grant the GOP a permanent majority in the US House.
