Media

Most members of Congress crave political security, and Terri Sewell has it. For more than a decade, she’s represented Alabama’s Seventh District, a 61 percent Black hodgepodge that awkwardly links the bustling cities of Birmingham and Montgomery via the sprawling, agriculturally rich Black Belt (named for the region’s dark topsoil), where more than a quarter of residents still live below the federal poverty line. The Seventh has never given her less than 72 percent of the vote.

In 2022, she wants to dismantle it.

“If we’re a quarter of the population, we should be a quarter of the seats,” Sewell told me recently. In last year’s census, Black residents accounted for 27 percent of Alabama’s population. Black voters, however, effectively wield power in just one of its seven districts—even though two districts with slimmer Black majorities would be possible to draw. “I’m for broadening the representation of African Americans across Alabama, instead of concentrating it in my district,” she said.

The current map, passed by the state’s Republicans in 2011, stuffs Black voters into the Seventh District so efficiently that when the Democrat Doug Jones narrowly upset the Republican Roy Moore in a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate, Jones lost all six of the state’s white-majority districts but prevailed overall thanks to a whopping 57-point margin in the Seventh.

All over the Deep South—in states such as Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—the story is familiar: Gerrymandered maps have packed Black voters into a lone Voting Rights Act district, while Republicans dominate every surrounding white-majority seat. In past decades, many of those VRA districts’ Democratic representatives were loath to unravel their own safe seats. But today, Democrats’ prevailing mentality has shifted. And as the 2022 redistricting wars heat up, multiple lawsuits aiming to unpack hyper-minority seats could help determine control of the House.

Sewell, 56, has sturdy roots in both the rural and urban ends of the Seventh: Her mother, Nancy Gardner Sewell, who passed away in June, won election as Selma’s first Black councilwoman three decades after John Lewis was nearly beaten to death crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Terri Sewell graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law (where she knew Michelle and Barack Obama separately, before they met each other), rising to become the first Black woman partner at her law firm in Birmingham, where she now resides.

All of which is to say that breaking the Seventh District in half would be a bittersweet sacrifice. “It would be hard to split up the Black Belt,” she acknowledged. “That is a concern. But for me, the need for another minority-opportunity district overrides that concern.”

More than 50 years after the passage of the VRA, the legal framework surrounding race and redistricting remains vague, unsettled, unevenly applied—and slow to keep up with changing political realities.

The current prevailing jurisprudence traces back to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), which interpreted Section 2 of the VRA to require that majority-minority districts be drawn if a racial minority was both politically cohesive and sufficiently numerous to form a majority in one district. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush’s Justice Department, charged with enforcing the VRA, took this to the extreme by compelling southern states to maximize majority-minority districts no matter how strange their shape. In some cases, the resulting lines were so garbled they looked more like white noise on an old TV with poor reception than discernible polygons.

In the 1992 election, these new VRA-compliant gerrymanders succeeded in tripling the House’s southern Black ranks, from five to 17. But their creation also had the side effect of “white-washing” adjacent districts, making them less Black and more Republican. In 1994, when President Bill Clinton and Democrats suffered a midterm backlash, Republicans gained 54 House seats, including a raft of pickups in states where new VRA districts had been drawn. In the mid-1990s, the Supreme Court reined in the most egregious district shapes, ruling that bizarre boundaries drawn using race as the “predominant” factor violated the equal-protection clause. But most new VRA seats remained, albeit with slightly modified lines.

For a time, this uneasy balance gave rise to an “odd bedfellows” dynamic in which both Black Democrats and white Republicans vigorously defended inkblot-like seats as crucial guarantors of minority access. As recently as 2010, Democratic Representative Corrine Brown and Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, both of Florida, filed a joint suit aimed at preserving Brown’s district, which slithered 150 miles through unpopulated swamps to link Black voters in Jacksonville and Orlando.

In recent decades, the Supreme Court has struggled—much like trying to define obscenity—to strike a balance between minority voting rights and sane-looking cartography. In the 2009 case of Bartlett v. Strickland, the Court’s 5–4 conservative majority ruled that states could choose to draw minority “coalition districts” (in which a sub–50 percent minority can win with support from other groups), but that only true majority-minority seats would merit protection under Section 2 of the VRA.

This variable legal landscape is problematic for a few reasons. As more non-Black voters in the urban South have become more open to voting for Black candidates, there are now fewer areas where districts with large Black majorities are necessary to elect them.

Today, only 18 of the House’s 53 Congressional Black Caucus members hail from districts where Black residents exceed 50 percent of the voting-age population, including just eight of the 21 from the South. The median CBC member now represents a district that’s a hair shy of 40 percent Black. Yet Gingles and Bartlett continue to offer GOP mapmakers a convenient, if cynical, legal rationale to keep Democratic votes bottled up in remaining hyper-packed Black seats.

“The bright line of 50-percent-plus-one [minority share in a district] might be outdated, given the nuances of political realities across the country,” says Leah Aden, the deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is technically nonpartisan. “And that’s part of the conversation that’s happening right now.”

In the South, where partisan voting patterns remain highly polarized by race, disentangling mapmakers’ partisan motives—which can be legal—from impermissible racial ones can be virtually impossible. In 2019, the Supreme Court definitively ruled that partisan gerrymandering isn’t a matter for federal courts to decide. That has led Republicans to accuse Democrats of using racial claims as a legal backdoor to overturn GOP-drawn maps and win more seats.

The irony is that the creation of Alabama’s Seventh and other districts like it were once major voting-rights breakthroughs. In 1992, these seats birthed new opportunities for Black candidates that hadn’t existed since Reconstruction. But as times and political conditions have changed, many of the same carve-outs that may have been necessary to elect new Black members three decades ago now look more like cul-de-sacs, aiding Republicans more than the cause of equal representation for minority voters.

In 2016, North Carolina GOP State Representative David Lewis infamously said of his plan to pass a new congressional map, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis’s words weren’t blatant braggadocio so much as a shrewd declaration that his motives were partisan, not racial.

Just weeks earlier, a panel of federal judges had ruled in Democrats’ favor to strike down the GOP’s 2011 plan for unnecessarily packing Black voters into two seats with squidlike shapes, and one judge complained that “traditional redistricting principles were subordinated to race.”

One of those seats, North Carolina’s Twelfth, is the most litigated district of all time. In the early 1990s, it meandered 160 miles, from Gastonia to Durham, grabbing every Black voter it could, at points only contiguous via the median strip of Interstate 85. In the 2016 court-ordered remapping, Republicans finally condensed it into a neat, compact seat in Charlotte—reducing its Black voting-age population share from 50 percent to 35 percent—and cutting incumbent Representative Alma Adams’s home 90 miles north, in Greensboro, out of the seat. Adams, however, moved to Charlotte and easily won reelection in the new Twelfth District. Today, she’s happy with the outcome. “I was never comfortable with all the packing. I think it limits the participation we can have as African Americans.”

To the northeast, Representative G. K. Butterfield, who got his start as a young Black lawyer in the 1970s challenging discriminatory at-large city-council districts, saw his winning margin in North Carolina’s rural First District reduced from 40 points to eight points after Black voters in Durham were unpacked into another seat. He, too, hasn’t minded the change. “Some of our [CBC] members are beginning to rethink what the [Black] thresholds should be.”

In 2014, Democrats won another federal lawsuit to break up a hyper-Black majority district: Virginia’s Richmond-to-Tidewater Third, held by Bobby Scott, who became Virginia’s first Black member of Congress in more than a century when he was elected in 1992. After courts ordered a new map in 2016, Virginia elected both Scott and a second Black member, Donald McEachin, from seats that were only 46 percent and 42 percent Black, respectively. “To suggest there is some numerical barrier that you have to achieve is absurd,” Scott says. “If the votes are changing, the standard ought to change.”

Today, the pendulum has swung: Whereas in previous decades, districts’ racial makeup was a subject of acrimonious debate within the Congressional Black Caucus and the House Democratic Caucus, the party is now closer to a consensus that minority voters deserve to wield influence in more seats. Democrats, led by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s well-funded National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), are expanding their unpacking crusade to Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

Republicans intend to fight them tooth and nail. “I don’t think Section 2 of the VRA gives any justification for a district that isn’t majority-minority, based on Bartlett,” says Jason Torchinsky, a partner at Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky and a go-to GOP redistricting lawyer. “If your argument is that you need to draw a 40 percent district for some reason that’s race-based, I think that’s a Fourteenth Amendment violation.”

Many Democrats fret that the current redistricting cycle is the first since the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder struck down a key section of the VRA that required southern states to clear changes to voting laws, including maps, with the Justice Department. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, of which Sewell is a main sponsor, would re-enshrine the VRA’s Section 5 preclearance regime.

But in practice, Section 5 of the VRA never did much to address overpacking. In 2011, the Obama Justice Department actually granted approval to every single GOP-drawn map in the Deep South, largely because its statutory mandate under Section 5 was to prevent retrogression—the weakening of existing minority opportunities—rather than to compel new opportunity districts where they were possible.

“I do think it’s interesting that when the Holder DOJ was in charge of preclearance, they didn’t object to a single [GOP] redistricting map in any of these states,” Torchinsky notes.

Holder begs to differ. “The granting of preclearance was never meant to indicate that a map was either fair or could withstand any court challenge,” he told me via email. “As the Supreme Court has repeatedly said, maps that pack voters together based on their race are unconstitutional—and there is no question they are discriminatory.”

Not every Democrat is on board with Holder’s plan. Representative Bennie Thompson, who, since 1993, has represented a 64 percent Black seat in the Mississippi Delta, says that although every state is different, “I’m not one who would sacrifice [Mississippi’s Second] District on a whim to elect another Democrat.” Thompson argues that current VRA seats should be left alone, while Republican districts in other states should be reconfigured to enhance minority voting strength. “There are even stranger districts represented by white Republicans than there are by Black Democrats,” he says, pointing to warped lines in Texas.

But in 2018, the highest-ranking Black member of the House, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, wrote a letter to his hometown newspaper lambasting South Carolina’s GOP for packing his district to diminish Black influence elsewhere back in 2011. “If I had drawn the lines, my district would not be 58 percent Black, and [GOP Representative] Joe Wilson, with whom I share Columbia, would not have a district that is 68 percent white,” Clyburn wrote. “I am hopeful that when redistricting is done after the 2020 decennial census, stacking and bleaching will not be the primary goals.”

The newest member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Louisiana’s Troy Carter, echoes Clyburn and Sewell’s sentiments. In April, Carter was elected to a 59 percent Black district that zigzags from New Orleans to Baton Rouge.

“We’ve only got one of six seats in a state that’s a third Black,” notes Carter, a former state senator from New Orleans. “If Baton Rouge and Opelousas can be tied in for a second majority-minority district, I’m all in. This process isn’t about me. Sometimes you have to give up some of your own to help someone else.”

Marc Elias, the same Democratic mega-lawyer who headed Democrats’ successful suits in North Carolina and Virginia, is slated to quarterback claims deeper in the South this time—with virtually unlimited funding from Holder’s NDRC. And although courts covering Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina could be tougher venues, any victories could reverberate beyond the state’s boundaries. After all, Democrats are sitting on a razor-thin eight-seat margin in the House, rendering every seat crucial in 2022.

Bobby Scott, 74, finds wry satisfaction in his colleagues’ attitudinal shift toward the pro-unpacking stance he says he’s espoused since serving in Virginia’s House of Delegates 40 years ago.

“Ten years ago, Marc Elias IDed me as the only CBC member advocating for a lower Black percentage in my district,” Scott says with a chuckle. “I’ve been on the barrel end of abuse for taking a position that has eventually been proven right.”

With widespread suffering after Hurricane Ida, Gov. John Bel Edwards faces renewed pressure to retroactively reinstate five weeks worth of pandemic jobless benefits, a move that could send $1,500 checks to more than 150,000 Louisiana residents.

Congressman Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, on Wednesday called on the Democratic governor to restore the benefits, arguing in a letter that he has the power to "provide relief to Louisianans who desperately need help" in the storm's catastrophic aftermath. 

The benefits were made available by Congress until Labor Day, but Edwards ordered Louisiana to stop accepting them effective July 31 in exchange for support from GOP state lawmakers for a permanent $28 boost to the state's regular weekly unemployment checks, beginning in 2022. 

When Edwards agreed to the compromise back in June, the pandemic was at a standstill and business owners complained that the payments encouraged workers to stay home. Since then, the landscape has shifted dramatically.

COVID-19 has surged in the state, flooding Louisiana's hospitals with record numbers of patients. And on Aug. 29, Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana's southeastern coast, peeling off roofs and dismantling homes from Port Fourchon up through the Mississippi border. 

"Thousands of Louisianans are looking for ways to pay for hotel rooms, gas, and basic necessities at this very moment," Carter wrote in his letter. "Many of those people are either in homes without power or were without power for a significant amount of time. Many more had damage to their homes or have been faced with unexpected costs in the last two weeks."

The federal programs provided a $300-a-week boost to state unemployment benefits, and extended jobless aid to gig-workers, self-employed contractors, and residents who had exceeded the the state's 26-week-long limit on collecting benefits.

Together, more than 150,000 Louisianans got booted off the benefits early, and thousands more had their jobless aid slashed in half. 

When asked on his monthly call-in show Wednesday about reinstating the federal benefits, Edwards launched into an explanation of the legislative compromise and encouraged survivors of the storm to instead sign up for disaster unemployment.

"There was legislation that was passed in the most recent session of the Legislature where we got a permanent weekly benefit increase, the first one, I think, in more than a decade, but it also called for ending the enhanced federal benefits early," Edwards said. "I signed the bill into law so that has passed now and September 6th has passed."

The U.S. Department of Labor issued a memo earlier this month letting states know that they have until Oct. 6 to restore the federal benefits. 

If Edwards doesn't reinstate the benefits, there's a chance the courts might. 

A group of six unemployed women filed a lawsuit at the end of July arguing that Edwards didn't have the authority under state law to reject the benefits. Their arguments mirrored those in several other states where court challenges were successful.  

In August, a Baton Rouge district court judge determined that ending the federal benefits early would undoubtedly cause "irreparable harm," but rejected the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction restoring the benefits because he wasn't convinced the case would be successful at trial. 

On Tuesday, the plaintiffs appealed that decision to Louisiana's First Circuit Court of Appeal. A hearing on the matter has not been scheduled. 

Wendy Manard, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that since that initial hearing the lead plaintiff, Autumn Young, died from COVID. Another plaintiff lost her home to Hurricane Ida and others have been displaced by the storm. 

"All of my plaintiffs have been through so much, whether it's being affected by Ida or COVID-19," Manard said. "They're just a sampling of the whole Louisiana community."

In his letter to Edwards, Carter argued that reinstating the benefits will help residents pay for basic necessities, like food and shelter. 

"Providing resources to those in need is the definition of neighbor helping neighbor," Carter wrote. "It's truly being a Good Samaritan, human, and Louisianan."

U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge plans to visit Kenner and New Orleans on Friday to see damage caused by Hurricane Ida. 

Fudge will tour the Westminster Tower senior apartments in Kenner at 11 a.m. followed by the Guste Senior Apartments in Central City an hour later. She will end her tour at New Orleans East Hospital at 2:25 p.m., a HUD spokesperson said Thursday. 

She is expected to speak with residents and municipal officials on her tour. She will be joined by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, U.S. Reps. Steve Scalise of Old Jefferson and Troy Carter of New Orleans, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and parish presidents. 

Fudge plans to highlight disaster aid that HUD has provided to local communities in recent weeks. That includes 27 regulatory and administrative waivers of federal rules to help speed Louisiana's recovery from the Category 4 storm, one of the largest collections of waivers issued by the department at once.

The waivers grant flexibility to governments that must rebuild affordable housing to replace housing lost in Ida, and let municipalities use federal money for emergency shelters or food giveaways, officials said. HUD is also providing immediate foreclosure relief and other assistance. 

Many senior living centers in the region are financed in whole or in part by HUD money. Their tenants were among some of the most vulnerable after Ida, as many could not cool their apartments, refrigerate some medications or use elevators after the power grid was damaged by the storm. 

Seven seniors in New Orleans died of excessive heat, according to the coroner's office: Myron Jones, 65; Reginald Logan and Deborah Anderson, both 74; Clarence Washington, 79; David Sneed, 65; Corinne Labat-Hingle, 70; and Illey Joseph, 73. 

Their deaths have raised questions about whether city officials should have done more after the storm to provide resources to elderly and disabled residents, or whether their apartment managers had done enough to ensure their buildings had adequate backup power. The New Orleans City Council is weighing whether to force those managers to have backup generators and submit to routine inspections of their buildings. 

Confirmed by the Senate in March, Fudge is the first Black woman to lead HUD in more than four decades. Previously, she served as the U.S. representative for Ohio's 11th District from 2008 to 2021 and before that was the first Black and first woman mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, from 2000 to 2008.

Members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation are requesting President Biden and Congress provide additional assistance amid Hurricane Ida’s “catastrophic” impact on the state.

“Hurricane Ida moved slowly through Louisiana causing catastrophic wind damage and flooding in numerous parishes and leaving nearly 1,000,000 people statewide without electricity, which experts say it will take weeks to restore,” said the delegation.

“At this time, many communities remain without access to drinking water, food, gasoline, and basic needs, while temperatures remain in excess of 100 degrees.”

The letter came from Republican Sens. John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy, along with multiple House members – and Reps. Clay Higgins, R, Steve Scalise, R, Mike Johnson, R, Garret Graves, R, Julia Letlow, R, and Troy Carter, D.

BIDEN TO VISIT LOUISIANA TO SURVEY DAMAGE LEFT BY HURRICANE IDA

The congress members added that while the full extent of damage was unknown, Congress should provide “substantial and robust emergency appropriations.”

“We are writing you now to alert you to the need for Congress to provide emergency supplemental appropriations to address Hurricane Ida and the storms from last year, as was done following Hurricane Katrina,” the letter read. 

“Without substantial and robust emergency appropriations from Congress to critical unmet needs accounts like the CDBG-DR [Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery] program, Louisiana families will continue to languish as a result of these devastating storms.”

In seven parishes, at least 95% of customers remained without power Thursday. Only 35,000 of the 405,000 homes and businesses in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish had power Thursday, according to the poweroutage.us website. Statewide, about 900,000 customers were without electricity, down from about 1.1 million at the height of the seventh named storm to hit Louisiana since the summer of 2020.

On Thursday, Biden tweeted: “To all those still in harm’s way or struggling to deal with the aftermath of these storms and fires — God bless you, keep the faith. We’re working day and night to help — and we will get this done.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also sent resources to help those impacted. On Wednesday, the agency said 12 urban search and rescue teams were operational in Louisiana.

It added: “Ambulance crews are deployed to Louisiana and Mississippi. This includes 53 ambulances and four air ambulances staged in Baton Rouge, La., with one additional air ambulance in transit. Today, an additional 158 ambulances are expected to arrive in Louisiana and 140 in Mississippi to support impacted areas.”

“FEMA has staged more than 4.5 million meals, 3.6 million liters of water, more than 134,000 tarps and 191 generators. Fifty-six additional generators are staged at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.” 

Bipartisan letter to House leadership urges relief amid National Flood Insurance Program rate hikes

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Reps. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09) and Garret Graves (R-LA-06) led a letter signed by 38 bipartisan Members of Congress demanding the National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) Risk Rating 2.0 implementation be postponed to prevent against unreasonable rate hikes unilaterally imposed by Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) new pricing methodology. In their letter to House leadership, the Members cite concerns surrounding the new methodology for assessing risk, which will lead to double digit rate hikes for certain policyholders. The Members request that House leadership include language delaying the implementation of Risk Rating 2.0 in upcoming legislation this month.

“While we appreciate FEMA’s work to create a NFIP that establishes actuarily sound rates, we are concerned about the burden of potential double digit rate hikes on our constituents by FEMA’s untested pricing methodology,” the Members wrote. “Therefore, we ask you to include language delaying the unfair implementation of Risk Rating 2.0 in any piece of legislation going to the floor this month until a more robust methodology that includes a lower premium cap is in place for policy holders.”

The Members continued, “[t]ime is of the essence with FEMA’s pending deadline to implement Risk Rating 2.0. We cannot accept another short-term extension of the NFIP without addressing these expected rate hikes for our constituents.”

According to FEMA state profiles, nearly 80 percent of policy holders in the eight states (approximately 1,385,759 in Florida, 661,830 in Texas, 394,757 in Louisiana, 170,685 in New Jersey, 155,349 in South Carolina, 157,316 in California, 117,093 in New York, and 104,145 in North Carolina) that account for the largest share of NFIP policies should expect to pay a higher premium under Risk Rating 2.0.

Rep. Pascrell has railed against a rushed implementation of Risk Rating 2.0, which could have disastrous effects on policyholders in New Jersey. In March, Reps. Pascrell and Frank Pallone (D-NJ-06) sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas urging the National Flood Insurance Program’s Risk Rating 2.0 implementation be postponed to ensure transparency in the process and fairness for New Jersey policyholders. Pascrell and Pallone also led legislation to extend the NFIP for five years, address the waste, abuse, and mismanagement plaguing the system, and cap annual rate increases at 9%.

Text of the Members’ latest letter to House leadership is provided below.

September 16, 2021

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi                                      The Honorable Kevin McCarthy

Speaker                                                                       Minority Leader

U.S. House of Representatives                                   U.S. House of Representatives

Washington, DC 20515                                              Washington, DC 20515

Dear Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader McCarthy,

We write because our constituents are in desperate need of relief from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) rate hikes expected under Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Risk Rating 2.0. While we appreciate FEMA’s work to create a NFIP that establishes actuarily sound rates, we are concerned about the burden of potential double digit rate hikes on our constituents by FEMA’s untested pricing methodology. Therefore, we ask you to include language delaying the unfair implementation of Risk Rating 2.0 in any piece of legislation going to the floor this month until a more robust methodology that includes a lower premium cap is in place for policy holders.

While Congress continues to debate needed affordability, fairness, and sustainable reforms to the NFIP, FEMA plans to unilaterally implement Risk Rating 2.0 in a phased approach beginning on October 1, 2021. FEMA’s Risk Rating 2.0 implementation announcement earlier this year has already impacted communities we represent that are still dealing with the far-reaching economic impacts of COVID-19 and recovering from the devastation of Hurricanes Ida and Henri.

There are serious implementation questions surrounding Risk Rating 2.0. Our constituents and those involved in implementing FEMAs rate hikes need more time to get the answers they deserve. The additional burden of up to double digit rate hikes by FEMA for our constituents, especially those in low- and moderate-income communities is too much for them to bear. Massive rate changes should be subject to additional scrutiny and review by Members of Congress in a long-term reauthorization, not arbitrary FEMA deadlines. A delay in implementing Risk Rating 2.0 is needed to allow Congress time to work on a comprehensive long-term reauthorization of the NFIP.

FEMA has already previewed that nearly 80 percent of policy holders in the eight states (approximately 1,385,759 in Florida[i], 661,830 in Texas[ii], 394,757 in Louisiana[iii], 170,685 in New Jersey[iv], 155,349 in South Carolina[v], 157,316 in California[vi], 117,093 in New York[vii], and 104,145 in North Carolina[viii]) that account for the largest share of NFIP policies should expect to pay a higher premium under Risk Rating 2.0. This increase is due to FEMA’s new methodology as well as the existing statutory limits on rate increases.

We appreciate the hard work Chair Maxine Waters and Ranking Member Patrick McHenry have put into developing a long-term NFIP reauthorization, including efforts to recognize the pending rate hikes. Time is of the essence with FEMA’s pending deadline to implement Risk Rating 2.0. We cannot accept another short-term extension of the NFIP without addressing these expected rate hikes for our constituents. We are eager to work together to implement reforms to the NFIP based on the realities experienced in the aftermath of major flooding and storms our constituents have just experienced. Thank you very much for your time and attention to our request.

Sincerely,

Bill Pascrell, Jr.                                                           Garret Graves

Member of Congress                                                  Member of Congress

Additional signers include the following Members of Congress:

Representative Brian Babin

Representative Vern Buchanan

Representative Cheri Bustos

Representative Troy A. Carter, Sr.

Representative Charlie Crist

Representative Brian Fitzpatrick

Representative Carlos A. Gimenez

Representative Josh Gottheimer

Representative Al Green

Representative Clay Higgins

Representative Brian Higgins

Representative Mike Johnson

Representative Andy Kim

Representative Douglas LaMalfa

Representative Julia Letlow

Representative Tom Malinowski

Representative Grace Meng

Representative Gregory F. Murphy, M.D.

Representative Troy E. Nehls

Representative Donald Norcross

Representative Steven Palazzo

Representative Frank Pallone, Jr.

Representative Donald M. Payne, Jr.

Representative Bill Posey

Representative Tom Rice

Representative David Rouzer

Representative Steve Scalise

Representative Mikie Sherrill

Representative Albio Sires

Representative Christopher H. Smith

Representative Michelle Steel

Representative Ritchie Torres

Representative David Trone

Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman

Representative Randy Weber

Representative Susan Wild

After a powerful hurricane tore across Louisiana and plunged the state into prolonged darkness, utility Entergy launched a plan to harden its power network to withstand the devastating winds that had reached nearly 140 mph.

That storm was Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and despite billions in investments made over the following decades, Hurricane Ida still crumpled critical parts of the state's power infrastructure last week, causing outages that are slowing the recovery efforts from the type of hurricane that climate change is expected to make more deadly in the coming years.

Democrats in Congress are planning a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes $73 billion to help fortify the nation's power grid by building thousands of miles of new transmission, streamlining permits for new lines and developing resilient grid technologies. But with the sector facing ever-increasing risks from climate-enhanced wildfires, floods and storms, building resilience into the system is likely to be both difficult and expensive.

"We know that every time there's a hurricane, we have to start all over again and we have to rebuild these power lines — that costs tons of dollars as well. It's kind of pay me now or pay me later," Democratic Rep. Troy Carter, who represents New Orleans, said in an interview. "Bite the bullet, make the investment and make the big hit now, but have the long-term benefits that will last a lifetime, and God only knows how many lives will be saved."

That's a similar idea to what the state and federal government did for flood protection after 2005's Hurricane Katrina submerged most of New Orleans, when they spent more than $14 billion to fortify the levees.

"We know preparation works. We've done it for levees, now we need to do it for the grid," Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy told POLITICO.

Just how to strengthen the grid to keep power flowing remains an open question. President Joe Biden traveled to Louisiana on Friday to survey the damage and meet with state and local leaders, and called for strengthening the power grid to withstand more powerful storms.

"When you guys are putting back up those high-tension wires again — and that's working — you’re not going to put up the same exact system," he told a briefing in LaPlace, La. "You’re going to have to build it better, and its resiliency."

And while the infrastructure question looms large in Washington and state capitals across the country, Louisiana residents are facing an immediate crisis with large sections of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes without power during one of the hottest months of the year.

"Temperatures are 100 degrees, in some cases higher than that, inside people's homes," said Carter. "The importance of working and getting people to cooler air, safer areas is critical. The danger that it has for senior citizens, young children, people with disabilities — it's almost as dangerous as the hurricane itself."

In a 2016 report, Entergy touted its work after the historic Hurricane Betsy to protect the power network. "The decision to take this action decades ago proved justified when [2005's] Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the coastline," it said in the report. "Although Entergy sustained significant system damage, a 2007 hardening study commissioned by the company indicated that 99 percent of the structures located within 20 miles of the Louisiana and Texas coastlines survived the winds."

Among the measures implemented, Entergy said, were building transmission lines using concrete or steel poles within 20 miles of the coast, replacing transmission and distribution crossing structures over major highways with concrete or steel poles, and building new substations to elevations above the 100-year flood plain, as recommended by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Unlike Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ida's danger came from excessive wind speeds that have toppled equipment in eight critical transmission lines and plunged one of those lines into the Mississippi River. That damage left the city with no way to deliver power to homes and businesses.

"The poles are done," said former FERC Chair Pat Wood III. "When I saw that the next morning, I just got sick," he added. "I thought: 'That's not supposed to happen.'"

Entergy has invested billions of dollars in the grid in just the past decade, including $4.2 billion in new transmission capacity since 2014, and has plans to invest an additional $2.4 billion through 2022. Just last year, Entergy completed a $100 million reliability project intended to strengthen its substations.

But whether those investments are able to keep pace with the increased intensity and frequency of storms is another question. Just last year, Hurricane Laura destroyed nearly 500 transmission line structures — a "large majority" of its system, according to Entergy.

"What we've been seeing with hurricanes recently is that they are occurring more frequently with greater intensity. But one of the issues that we've also seen is that you're seeing hurricanes occur within quick succession of each other," said Eliza Hotchkiss, who leads the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory's cybersecurity and resilience team. That leaves communities with less time to recover, she said.

Entergy executives told reporters last week that the hardest hit areas in New Orleans would likely take weeks to recover.

"For many of those areas, this will not be a repair, it will be a rebuild," Entergy Louisiana President and CEO Phillip May said during the call.

The storm has stirred warnings that power providers must make further investments in the grid in a year that has seen cold weather-fueled power failures in Texas and record-breaking wildfires threaten power grids in the West.

"If our society has not learned that making a major investment upfront to avoid the tentative repairs on the back end, if we have not learned that, my gosh, we're not going to learn anything," said Cassidy. "If all you do is slapdash a Band-Aid on top of what you had before, you get the same results," he added.

When it comes to hardening the grid, New Orleans' Carter has advocated for burying the city's power lines underground, using authority under the Stafford Act that governs disaster spending, or infrastructure legislation — options Carter said would increase grid reliability and not pass costs onto ratepayers.

Lawmakers are currently weighing passage of a bipartisan infrastructure bill, H.R. 3684 (117), that would make investments in grid resiliency and expanding electric power transmission lines — though advocates warn the levels are not adequate to meet the challenge facing utilities across the nation.

"We have hurricanes every year. This is not something new," Carter said. "We have hurricane season every single year. We don't know how many, we don't know the severity, but we know we're going to have hurricanes, and every year we put good money after bad putting our infrastructure above ground."

Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, a trade association that advocates for investment in the electric transmission system, said the cost of burying power lines is "multiples" higher when compared to overhead transmission.

"That's what generally has been the real prohibiting factor for those types of solutions," he said.

While the New Orleans City Council, which regulates Entergy's local subsidiary, said the utility met national reliability standards, the projected length of outages will likely trigger a "360, post-mortem review," according to New Orleans City Council member Joseph Giarrusso.

"There's very little question that this Council is going to open up a wide-ranging investigation to what happened," Giarrusso said. "We have a lot of questions."

Wood, the former FERC chief, agreed that the storm's impact on the power grid "would definitely merit an investigation" from the federal regulator and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation as well. That would include determining whether current reliability standards are still sufficient for the region.

"NERC, FERC and the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council are working together as industry diligently assesses the extent of damage and works to restore power as safely and quickly as possible," NERC said in a statement. FERC is continuing to monitor the impact of the storm on the power grid, FERC Chair Richard Glick said in a tweet.

Environmentalists point out that local groups have been fighting Entergy for years to build more local power generation, including greater deployment of distributed energy resources such as solar and battery storage.

"Rather than delivering what the customers want, the utility fought against that and instead has delivered these gas-fired plants," said Joe Daniel, senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, referring to the New Orleans Power Station, which opened last year. "What that means now is customers are unable to have access to electricity in these storms, and are more reliant on waiting for these big plants to get back running."

Carter also argued that more distributed energy resources, and less reliance on carbon-emitting resources, can strengthen the ability of the grid to provide power during extreme weather events.

"I've preached it for a long time and I'll continue to. We need to lessen our dependency on fossil fuels," he said, adding that "the reliability of having alternative means would make a huge difference today to the nearly million people who are suffering in the heat, because they don't have electricity."

The New Orleans Power Station was controversial: It faced significant local opposition and Entergy was caught paying actors to support the plant at local meetings. The utility has recently cited it as a critical part of restoring power to the city.

Adding more distributed energy resources — such as solar, storage and microgrids — to the power grid can certainly help with resilience, particularly for ensuring critical facilities are able to avoid outages altogether or get up and running quickly, according DOE's Hotchkiss. Mobile microgrids, for instance, can be used for fast restoration and recovery, according to Alison Silverstein, who led the U.S. investigation on the 2003 blackout under FERC, but such technologies are not a catch-all solution.

"You can't say, 'Oh, well, if every house had its own solar and battery system, they wouldn't be trashed,' because if it's going to take off the roof, it's going to take the solar up with it," said Silverstein, who now works with DOE on grid reliability.

One of the major outstanding questions is what system failures were reasonably foreseeable — and therefore could have been prevented. Such calculations are constantly being made by utilities in vulnerable regions, according to Silverstein, and it's ultimately a balancing act of how high a company's risk is and how much they're willing to spend to mitigate that risk.

"Part of the challenge here is that we know that the entire Gulf Coast is in the path of hurricanes, and that hurricanes are merciless," she said. "And a lot of those folks, their regulators do not appear to be ready to spend more money against higher levels of risk."

Though the power remains out for more than 95% of St. Charles Parish residents and businesses after Hurricane Ida, the lights are now on in at least one community.

Power has been restored to Montz, a small neighborhood located on the western end of the parish’s east bank.

“It’s a glimmer of hope,” St. Charles Parish President Matthew Jewell said.

St. Charles Parish was one of the areas hardest hit by the destructive winds in Ida’s eyewall, which raked the area for hours Aug. 29-30, destroying roofs, snapping trees and power poles and wrecking the electrical infrastructure. Entergy is still repairing the damaged transmission systems that left the entire New Orleans region in the dark after the storm.

Parts of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish have already seen powered restored, as has St. Tammany Parish on the north shore. But Entergy estimates that the majority of residents in St. Charles Parish won’t get power back until Sept. 29.

“If customers are on that same network and are able to safely accept power, they would be restored, as well,” Entergy spokesperson Brandon Scardigli said.

The company sent an additional 200 lineman into the parish Wednesday morning, and crews are working to restore power to St. Charles Parish Hospital in Luling, according to Scardigli.

The linemen hitting the streets have been joined by debris collection crews, who began task of picking up after Ida on Sunday.

It's a massive undertaking: The large grappling trucks hold about 100 cubic yards of debris, according to Jewell, and officials estimate Ida left behind about 1 million cubic yards of construction debris, downed trees and branches across the parish.

The crews are starting in areas that are the most accessible. There were still some trouble spots around the parish Wednesday, including Norco, Mimosa and St. Rose, where low-hanging power lines still obstruct the roadways, Jewell said.

The lucky residents of Montz, however, were re-energized Monday because they live near a critical structure, the Little Gypsy power plant, which was re-energized.

Garbage collection has also restarted around the parish, though the going has been slow. Pelican Waste, based in Houma, is having staffing problems, according to parish officials. Jewell said he suspects that many of those employees suffered damage to their own homes and trying to take care of their property and families.

To ease the overflow of refuse at curbs around the parish, officials on Wednesday began rotating dumpsters and garbage trucks to different neighborhoods to allow residents an opportunity to dispose of some of their household trash.

Late Wednesday morning, Marty Pizzitola, 66, was the fourth vehicle to back up to a garbage truck parked in front of the Destrehan spray park on Ormond Boulevard. He unloaded several dozen quite smelly bags of trash from his pick-up truck. Pizzitola was carrying a week’s worth of garbage from two families – including rotting food emptied from refrigerators and freezers.

“Sorry for the stink,” he said, as he helped workers from the parish and Pelican Waste transfer the bags from his pick-up to the garbage truck.

St. Charles Parish residents will receive notification and location through the parish alert system when a dumpster is in their neighborhood, Jewell said.

“We want residents to be patient. I promise, normal trash collection is coming,” he said.

Jewell and other parish officials joined U.S. Reps. Garret Graves, Julia Letlow and Troy Carter on a tour of the parish Wednesday.