One recent Sunday, I recently watched “The Inquisitor,” the Independent Lens documentary about Barbara Jordan, the groundbreaking Black congresswoman who was a champion of many constitutional principles.
I then turned to “60 Minutes” and watched Gov. Jeff Landry say 45,000 Louisiana absentee ballots being discarded was “not a big deal.” His statement came days after he postponed the U.S. House primary elections, allowing the legislature time to eliminate a Black-majority district from the state’s congressional map. Votes already cast for the May 16 races were invalidated.
The first is a voice that built the Voting Rights Act, and the second a voice that just buried it — separated by a generation of lost ground.
Louisiana did not stumble into this moment; it built the blueprint.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which gave “separate but equal” the force of constitutional law and handed every Jim Crow regime its legal vocabulary.
When our governor says Louisiana must be “unshackled” from race-based redistricting, the record disagrees. Louisiana is the shackle’s blacksmith. Gov. Landry didn’t put the hammer down; he just picked up another one.
On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Louisiana v. Callais. The 6-3 decision struck down a 2024 congressional map containing two majority-Black districts in a state where Black residents are a third of the population.
Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, said the ruling renders Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” Challengers must now prove race-based motive — nearly impossible — while the legislature need only announce its motive was partisan.
Race walks in. Party slams the door.
Like Plessy, Callais is already a Louisiana export. Florida passed a new congressional map within hours, designed to flip up to four Democratic seats by shrinking minority-opportunity districts. Tennessee approved its own redraw days later, with House Speaker Cameron Sexton announcing “states like Tennessee can redistrict based on partisan politics.”
Other Southern states are attempting to navigate their own revisions.
Louisiana planted the seed once and watched it bloom across the Jim Crow South, and it has sown it once again. The proliferation is not confined to redistricting.
House Bill 906, sponsored by Rep. Beth Billings, R-Destrehan, would let Democratic and Republican party leaders close their primaries to no-party voters, who account for roughly a third of Louisiana’s electorate. Secretary of State Nancy Landry backs the bill, citing an anticipated “technical challenge” for the state’s voting system in 2028.
The modern literacy test is not a pop quiz at the polls; it is a procurement memo in a legislative hearing room.
Ian Haney López, a legal scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, calls this dog-whistle politics, coded appeals in race-neutral grammar so the speaker can deny the content while the policy delivers it anyway.
Gov. Landry’s vocabulary is the textbook: “Equal rights.” “No one gets extra rights.” “Unshackled.” “Failed narrative.”
Each phrase ostensibly applies to everyone. In function, each clears a group from the table.
The governor told “60 Minutes” he grew up around Black people, so he can relate.
With respect, growing up around us is not the same as being us.
Was he threatened when wanting to vote? Were crosses burned on his lawn? Was he made to take a test to register to vote? Was he threatened with being beaten or lynched?
Was he refused a job because of his race? Called the N-word, hated simply because his skin was kissed by the sun? Spat on, beaten? Forced to step off the curb when a white person passed or wait outside the store until the white customers cleared?
If the answer is no, the proximity is real but the experience is not.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was not written for proximity; it was written for survivors.
Inside the governor’s party, the absurdity is registering.
“I don’t know why you would tell someone, if they wanted to vote, that they can’t,” Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, said about Billings’ bill to close party primaries to no-party voters.
Landry called the 45,000 discarded absentee ballots “not a big deal,” “not my fault.”
Those ballots were cast by people in districts being redrawn to disappear them. The geography of disenfranchisement here has never needed new tools, only new permissions.
Callais granted one. HB 906 would grant another.
George Washington warned the young republic in 1796 against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” factions subverting the will of the people for partisan gain. His nightmare is Louisiana law.
Louisiana forged the policy that produced Plessy, and it’s now shaping the blade that follows Callais. Whether the state condones this evisceration of voting rights depends on if enough of us recognize the spirit of party is the blacksmith’s newest hammer — and demand the governor put it down.