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Hurricane-battered Louisiana’s congressional delegation is divided over Democrats’ package to avert a government shutdown, raise the nation’s legal debt limit, and allocate nearly $30 billion in emergency aid responding to Hurricane Ida and other natural disasters.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said he’ll break with his GOP leaders and “probably” vote to pass the package “because my state needs the help,” even as he predicted it would fail in the Senate. The state’s other senator, Republican Bill Cassidy, hasn’t made up his mind yet about how he’ll vote, and the delegation’s only Democrat, Rep. Troy Carter, will vote yes.

But two Louisiana Republicans in House leadership — Minority Whip Steve Scalise, who runs the GOP’s vote-counting operation, and Rep. Mike Johnson, who helps run GOP messaging — are urging their colleagues to vote down the Democratic proposal when it comes to the floor later Tuesday. They are complaining that President Biden and the Democrats are spending too much, imposing higher taxes and driving up inflation through their separate $3.5 trillion social safety net package.

“If you notice the debt that [Democrats have] incurred just this year alone to fund things like bailing out failed states, paying people not to work and then ultimately now to pass this [$5 trillion-plus] tax-and-spend bill … we're not the only ones against it. Most American people don't want this level of spending and taxes that are going to increase inflation even higher,” Scalise told reporters after huddling with House Republicans. 

“Democrats want to bring bad policies like that, they're the ones that are going to have to answer for it,” Scalise added. “They shouldn't try to tie it, by the way, to a bill that funds basic needs of government, and the Senate made it clear they're not going to go for this.” 

Asked by The Hill if he supports the $28.6 billion figure that Democrats have attached to the government funding bill and debt ceiling package, Scalise would say only that he wanted the disaster aid voted on separately.  

“We wanted that to be a stand-alone bill, and I think in the end it will be separated from this package before it's all said and done, I think by the end of next week,” Scalise said. “You will see that removed from this debt ceiling increase bill. Again, they don't have the votes in the Senate to tie all this to a single package, so this is early in this process, and we’ll ultimately get another chance to vote on that when it comes back from the Senate.”

By linking the funding bill and debt ceiling issue, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) are daring Senate Republicans to oppose the package and risk twin disasters: a default on nation’s debt and a federal shutdown in the middle of a global pandemic.

But by tying the disaster relief to the package, Democrats also have put Republicans from storm-ravaged states such as Kennedy, Cassidy, Scalise and Johnson in a tough bind. The top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby of Alabama, said he will also vote no on the package because it includes the debt hike, even though his state was also hit hard by Hurricane Ida.

“I support advancing a continuing resolution with much-needed disaster relief and targeted Afghan assistance,” Shelby said. “But I will not support a package that raises the debt limit.”

Louisiana will need at least $2.5 billion in federal assistance to help its residents rebuild their homes and recover after Hurricane Ida, Gov. John Bel Edwards wrote Monday in a letter to Congress, urging support for disaster relief legislation. 

The Democratic governor traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with lawmakers as deliberations heat up over a stopgap spending bill that includes $28.6 billion in funding for communities hammered over the last two years by natural disasters ranging from hurricanes to wildfires. 

The House of Representatives passed the spending bill Tuesday, with only Democratic support. It now heads to the Senate, where Republicans say they will block the measure because it suspends the debt ceiling, allowing the United States to borrow money and avoid a government shutdown. 

Altogether, Edwards said Louisiana needs $3.4 billion to address "unmet" housing needs after getting battered by the string of storms, stretching back to Hurricane Laura more than a year ago. The dollar figure would cover recovery expenses not covered by insurance companies or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Edwards estimates that 8,000 homes are now unlivable after sustaining major damage from Hurricane Ida's catastrophic path through southeastern Louisiana. Billions of dollars would go to housing efforts similar to the Road Home program after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, or the Restore program following the 2016 floods. 

Congressman Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, the only member of Louisiana's House delegation to vote for the legislation, said it includes $5 billion in housing relief for Hurricane Ida. It's unclear how much would be set aside for Louisiana. 

"Louisianians have been through a lot and this bill recognizes that struggle," Carter said in a House floor speech. "It also helps us to begin working on those challenges."

The disaster aid is tied to a government funding bill and faces challenges in the Senate, where Republicans are lining up in opposition. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, said Tuesday the United States couldn't afford to let nearly two years worth of natural disasters go unaddressed any longer. 

But in a narrowly divided Senate, Cassidy said a bill that suspends the debt ceiling wouldn't get enough support from his Republican colleagues to pass. The Senate is divided 50-50 between parties, and Democrats will be hard-pressed to find 10 Republicans to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a filibuster.

Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana, said he will likely buck his party leadership and vote for the measure if "the disaster relief portion is acceptable." He added, "Because my people desperately need the help."

“I am committed to disaster assistance," Cassidy said. "They give me all these variations, it includes this, it includes that, it includes this or that. I say just show me the bill and I will tell you how I am going to vote. But I am committed to voting for disaster relief. We got to get relief to folks back home."

Edwards in his letter sought funding for state and local governments, who owe roughly $130 million following last year's storms and another $226 million after Hurricane Ida to cover the non-federal share of FEMA grants.

Preliminary estimates peg crop and timber loss from Hurricane Ida at more than $200 million, and damage to the commercial fishing industry at $480 million, Edwards said. 

The storms also caused massive damage to the state's electrical transmission systems, and Edwards said it will likely cost around $750 million to repair the infrastructure following Hurricane Ida. Last year's storms caused $545 million worth of damage to the electrical grid, he wrote. 

Edwards also asked for a specific appropriation through the Department of Health and Human Services to shore up health care organizations in Louisiana who sustained damage from the storms and have had to shell out millions of dollars to boost their labor force amid another wave of COVID-19.

"The funding needs described above are critical to our state's recovery, and we need your help to bring them home," Edwards wrote. "The speed of our recovery is also critical to success and to our people who are in need now."

When the Louisiana Legislature meets next February 1, 2022 to finalize new maps of state house, senate and congressional districts, neither the Republican-controlled legislature nor Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards will automatically have the upper hand.  The legislature will propose the maps but Governor Edwards must sign them into law. Hence, there will be plenty of negotiations along the way.

Redistricting occurs every ten years after the release of the latest census. Because the 2020 census was conducted during the pandemic, some believe that too many citizens did not participate, thereby calling into question the accuracy of the results.  

According to the website FiveThirtyEight, there are 15 legislative districts that Democrats control and an additional five that lean Democrat. Conversely there are 15 district Republicans control and five that lean Republican. While the remaining districts are technically up for grabs, Republicans have been gaining voter strength statewide while the number of registered Democrats continues to decrease. Democratic strength is centered in New Orleans as well in pockets of Baton Rouge and Shreveport.  Though there are six Congressional districts representing Louisiana, only one seat – the 2nd Congressional District based in New Orleans – is held by a Democrat, Troy Carter Sr. 

On June 14, 2021 the Louisiana Legislature approved House Concurrent Resolution #90 which provided for minimally acceptable criteria for any proposed redistricting plans.  In April, 2021 several individual Louisiana voters filed a challenge to the congressional maps in state court anticipating that the legislature would fail to draw valid lines. Filed in Orleans Parish Civil District Court, the case is captioned English vs Ardoin, with a case number 2021-03538. The petition was last modified on April 26, 2021.

The Joint Committee on Governmental Affairs held its first meeting Friday, September 17, 2021. It has scheduled a series of regional meetings around that state to gather input from citizens. New Orleans area voters can attend a January 5, 2022 session at the University of New Orleans which will take place from 5:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m.  Other meetings are scheduled in Shreveport, Monroe, Alexandria, Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Lafayette and Thibodeaux.  For those who might miss a regional meeting, an additional forum will be held on January 20, 2022 at 11 a.m. at the State Capitol.  

Louisiana Progress, a solutions-driven organization that strives to be a force for good in local community organizing, will be hosting a webinar with Southern University Law Center on October 14. Redistricting materials will be available for webinar participants. 

Some experts are predicting that the number of legislators from north Louisiana will decrease due to out-migration and that more legislators could be added along the 1-10/1-12 corridor in parishes close to the Mississippi River. When the previous census was taken in 2010, New Orleans had lost considerable population in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those numbers subsequently rebounded but by mid-decade had begun to fall again. Still, the overall increase might lead to a new legislative seat.

The Data Center, which provides independent analysis for informed decision making in Southeast Louisiana, recently analyzed information from Orleans Parish’s 2020 census.  According to their research, the population of New Orleans grew from 343,829 in 2010 to 383,997 in 2020 – an increase of 11.7% which was well above the national population growth rate of 7.4%. 

Of the 40,000 new residents, over 16,000 are White; nearly 13,000 Hispanic; almost 8,000 Multicultural; 1,000 Black and about 700 Asian.   

Unfortunately New Orleans still has only 79% of its pre-Katrina total population as some neighborhoods have grown and others have shrunk.  Given that 16 years have passed, that additional 21% of the population may never return.

The Data Center divides New Orleans into 72 distinct neighborhoods. As of April 2020, five neighborhoods have less than half the population they did before Katrina including four that encompass former public housing sites which were redeveloped as mixed income housing.  Seven neighborhoods – the Lower Garden District, CBD, Audubon, Lake Terrace, Black Pearl, Lakeshore/Lake Vista, and Lake Oaks – are even more populous than they were in 2000. 

Fully 51 neighborhoods gained some population between 2010 and 2020. The Marigny and the Irish Channel lost population and housing units when shotgun doubles were converted to singles and other renovations took place. Though the number of housing units increased in the French Quarter, occupancy rates have fallen, perhaps suggesting that increasingly homes in the French Quarter are used seasonally. The average household size also fell in Mid-City.

While Black population grew in Central City, Gert Town, Holy Cross, Milneburg, St. Anthony and Treme/Lafitte, White and Hispanic populations grew faster. Therefore a smaller percentage of Blacks reside in those neighborhoods.

Hispanic individuals represent more than 10% of residents in 10 New Orleans neighborhoods. Black New Orleanians represent more than 60% of the population in 37 neighborhoods, but have fallen to below half in Broadmoor, Mid-City and Milan. The Multiracial population is the fastest growing group in New Orleans and now represents more than 4% of residents in 18 neighborhoods. 

The Asian population has not grown substantially, and as of 2020, disproportionately resides in New Orleans East. Aurora/English Turn, and the Central Business District. In Bayou St. John, Bywater, East Riverside and the Irish Channel, the White population is now above 60% of the population.

The 2020 census counted more than 2,000 children in Little Woods, Village de l’Est, Lakeview, Central City, Tall Timbers/Brechtel, Old Aurora and Behrman.

According to the Data Center, New Orleans has become more Hispanic, more Multicultural, and more White. Whites now represent 32% of all New Orleanians. The share of New Orleans that is Black has fallen to 54%. Hispanics and Multicultural New Orleanians make up the balance. 

New Orleans has always been a melting pot, but the ingredients in the gumbo continue to change. Perhaps the new maps will reflect the current ethnic balance of New Orleans’ ever-changing population.

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - The nation’s Housing and Urban Development chief spent the day in the New Orleans area touring Hurricane Ida damage.

HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge first stopped at Westminster Tower, a residential complex for senior citizens in Kenner, a suburb just outside the city of New Orleans.

“Just even from the airport certainly you can see the remnants of all of the damage, and I’m just really excited about the fact that I can possibly help. The president and HUD and all of government, the Congress, my former colleagues here are all trying to find out how we can move government faster,” Fudge said after that tour.

She was joined there by Congressmen Troy Carter and Steve Scalise who represent portions of Louisiana in Congress.

“I have asked Speaker Pelosi to assemble a delegation of bipartisan members of the house, Republicans and Democrats to come down, to see firsthand, to recognize that this is not just widgets these are people’s lives, these are people, this is real, there’s real pain, there’s real suffering and Steve and I have worked very hard together to make people understand that hurricanes are not partisan and the people that the people who are suffering throughout the state of Louisiana of Louisiana deserve help,” said Carter.

Scalise said he wants to make sure communities have greater flexibility in using some federal funds they receive.

“To try to get their parishes back up and running who were hit the hardest by Hurricane Ida and so we were talking to Secretary Fudge about Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery specifically because that does fall under HUD, that’s one of the things we’re working to get into a Supplemental Appropriations Bill because it would allow Secretary Fudge to work closely with local leaders who need that flexible money, not rigid money where it can only be spent in one way but money where they can actually help to get families back in their houses,” Scalise stated.

Around lunchtime Fudge toured the Guste high-rise building in the inner-city section of New Orleans, where seniors also live.

Her last stop was the New Orleans East Hospital where Governor John Bel Edwards was present along with Carter, Mayor Latoya Cantrell, and members of the state legislature who represent New Orleans.

“We look forward to you, working with you Secretary Fudge so that we can build back better because just like this hospital was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, we’ve got hospitals in Terrebonne Parish and in St. Charles Parish that were destroyed in Hurricane Ida and they’re publicly owned hospitals and we look forward to building them back better,” said Edwards.

At the hospital, Fudge repeated what she says is the Biden administration’s commitment to seeing Louisiana recover from the catastrophic storm.

“The old folks used to say what don’t kill you makes you strong and I know that we are stronger every time we survive one of these kinds of storms but I’m just here to say to you today that I work for a president who does understand your problems and understands your needs and has directed me to be sure that I can come and talk to you about what we can do for you but also say to you that it has to be done in a way that everybody benefits, there must be equity,” said Fudge.

We don’t like Louisiana being known nationally as a place where people are regularly assaulted or killed under any circumstance, but certainly not by our own Louisiana State Police. Led by The Associated Press, national media has focused on the case of Ronald Greene, in which Monroe-based Troop F officers chased then beat the man. He died.

There's more. Much more.

The same State Police unit beat another man, Aaron Larry Bowman, not far from his Monroe home — and not long after they beat Greene. They hit Bowman 18 times with a flashlight. He survived.

State Police beat up another man, Morgan Blake, during a 2019 suspicion of marijuana arrest. They slammed him against a vehicle, threw him onto the ground and beat him. They lied, saying he tried to escape.

Turns out State Police hit a Hispanic truck driver in 2010 near Interstate 12 in Tangipahoa Parish, too.

With focused, deep reporting, The Associated Press has continued to uncover disturbing internal proof that troopers hid abuses to avoid discipline or charges. State Police leadership did very little.

Though Greene is dead, there have been no arrests or charges in the Greene case as the State Police have declined to arrest one of their own on their own. One of the involved troopers was told that he was being fired and he died in a single-car crash soon after. The Bowman incident was not investigated by State Police for more than a year, after a lawsuit by Bowman.

Gov. John Bel Edwards has voiced confidence in Superintendent Lamar Davis, who took over after the initial scandals. Four troopers or ex-troopers have been arrested — but not charged — in state courts in three of the incidents, those involving Bowman, Blake and another man, Antonio Harris. 

The Associated Press acquired a number of State Police bodycam and patrol vehicle videos of several incidents, so these accounts are not based on anonymous sources or the memory of a single eyewitness. Nearly all of those beaten were Black. Of the times force has been used in the state trooper incidents reviewed by the AP, 67% of those situations have involved Black people. That’s double the Black population percentage in Louisiana.

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, the ACLU of Louisiana and the Urban League of Louisiana are among a number of individuals and organizations calling for a pattern-and-practice investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. The department has been conducting them for years, in small and large law enforcement agencies. These investigations often conclude with agencies deciding to cooperate and to agree to reforms. Or the U.S. DOJ can sue agencies to make changes.

We continue to be dismayed by such long delays in discovery of video evidence. During his regular monthly radio program Wednesday afternoon, Edwards said allegations that there's been a cover-up are overblown, in part because the district attorney and the Justice Department asked that the videos not be released. He said he finds some of the trooper actions criminal but he said "as to whether those criminal actions were the cause of death" is a question for prosecutors.

We would like to see the governor demand accountability and take actions to show he means it. Davis must send a stronger signal to his troops — and to the public — so everyone can hear that this type of law enforcement is unacceptable.

We welcome a probe by the U.S. Justice Department. However, there are things that can — and must — happen under the leadership of Edwards and Davis. Edwards and Davis don’t need to wait.

BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) – Louisiana’s senators are working to put pressure on the federal government to provide more aid to the state after Hurricane Ida. For both Sen. Bill Cassidy and Sen. John Kennedy, the main focus right now is to get additional relief dollars to the state to get people back in their homes and infrastructure fixed.

But for long-term plans, that is where they differ.

Additional relief aid for both southwest and southeast Louisiana is already in the works. The entire Louisiana delegation has signed on to additional aid following Ida and President Joe Biden said he would support it. It would total $10 billion for Louisiana and additional dollars to the other states impacted by the hurricane.

“Now we will get the money for SWLA in the near future and it will actually end up being more. Under President Trump’s administration it was going to be around 500M but now we’ve been able to increase that we think close to 900M or even more,” Sen. Cassidy said.

Both the senators supported a bill that would extend the national flood insurance program that expires at the end of the month. Kennedy said that is expected to pass next week and the next battle will be keeping the cost of insurance down.

“The longer term problem with flood insurance is they’re going to raise our premiums. FEMA is in charge of the rates. They call it risk rating 2.0. In Louisiana we call it a rate increase and I’m fighting them on that,” Kennedy said.

Cassidy said his bipartisan infrastructure bill would benefit the state in future storms from coastal protections to hardening the electrical grid. He said it is more important than ever. One issue he is working on at the state and local levels is finding housing for people displaced from the storm.

“We have to have affordable housing that is built to hurricane code in the places where people live and work,” Cassidy said.

Kennedy wants to put the main focus on getting funding to the individual so they can rebuild their homes quicker.

“I don’t want to give the government more money to build housing. Most of my people have houses. They were damaged, they need to get back to their original houses and what I’m working on is money to people,” Kennedy said.

As for hardening the grid, he believes it would be too expensive to have underground power lines and Louisianans shouldn’t have to foot the bill. 

Kennedy voted against the bipartisan bill saying there is too much in it that is not true infrastructure. He said this about both the $3.5 trillion bill by democrats and the $1.5 trillion bipartisan bill. Cassidy said only Congressman Troy Carter has come out in support of the bill. It waits in the House of Representatives for a final vote before going to the President’s desk if passed.

Despite their differences, Kennedy and Cassidy agree Louisiana will be able to come back stronger and better prepared for the next storm.

When Gov. John Bel Edwards issued an executive order suspending legal deadlines in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, he also implemented a statewide eviction moratorium without expressly stating it.

“Yes, evictions are included in the proclamation,” the governor’s office confirmed in an email.

The order was issued amid widespread power outages and storm damage in southeast Louisiana. Referring to affected residents, Edwards said in a news release, “We need for them to be focused on recovery and not whether they will be held to a court deadline.”

The expansive exercise of executive powers – first for COVID-19 and now for natural disasters – is a cause for concern, according to some legal experts.

“No one would question that a hurricane constitutes an emergency, and I would think that court proceedings constitute state business. So he is probably acting within the limits of his conferred emergency powers,” said Luke Wake, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation.

“But I think we ought to be concerned about Governors invoking these sort of emergency powers on a recurrent basis, especially when done on a statewide basis where in fact the affected areas may be more localized,” he said.

Wake and the Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm, previously represented a group of Louisiana landlords who challenged the federal eviction ban.

Before Hurricane Ida, Louisiana property owners were subjected to the eviction moratorium for nearly a year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the coronavirus-related policy was unconstitutional. The moratorium had been extended multiple times but was struck down Aug. 26.

Ida made landfall in southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, and Edwards’ executive order effectively created another statewide eviction moratorium until Sept. 24, though it may be extended if deemed necessary. Edwards since has declared a state of emergency for Tropical Storm Nicholas.

Edwards, a Democrat, had praised the Biden administration’s eviction moratorium, which was implemented through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The governor’s office publicized the Louisiana Rental Assistance Program as providing funding relief for renters and landlords during the eviction ban.

The state rental assistance program, however, has issued a fraction of available funds. As of Wednesday, $29.2 million of $161 million has been disbursed since March.

Landlords were saddled with taxes, insurance premiums, mortgage payments and repair costs since September 2020, regardless of whether tenants paid rent. The new statewide eviction freeze could present additional problems.

The order applies to legal proceedings in all state courts, administrative agencies and boards. It invokes emergency powers under the state Homeland Security and Emergency Assistance Disaster Act and suspends deadlines relating to Louisiana’s Code of Civil Procedure.

Under Louisiana law, landlords must follow specific civil procedures when attempting to evict a tenant, such as obtaining a court order.

According to Louisiana Realtors, a Baton Rouge-based real estate association, suspending legal deadlines undermines a landlord’s ability to obtain an eviction order from a court in all 64 parishes until the suspension is rescinded.

“However, the suspension of deadlines applies to legal proceedings and would not prohibit the posting of an eviction notice or the commencement of legal action to obtain an eviction order,” the organization said after the governor’s executive action.

Confusion occurred last year when Edwards suspended legal deadlines because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Republican-controlled Louisiana Legislature passed Act 162 in response. It allows for deadlines that would have expired during the suspension period to expire on the date immediately following the end of the suspension period.

“That Act was specific to the Governor’s orders issued in response to COVID-19 but would likely be used as guidance in this instance as well,” Louisiana Realtors said.

The question of when the temporary eviction block will be lifted is important to landlords and renters. Previous executive orders, such as Edwards’ statewide indoor mask mandate, have lasted longer than the initial timeline.

Edwards implemented the statewide mask mandate Aug. 2. It is still in effect despite an initial Sept. 1 expiration date.

Louisiana congressman Troy Carter, a Democrat representing New Orleans, has been an outspoken proponent of the federal eviction moratorium. He also urged Edwards to suspended evictions after Ida.

“Without a statewide moratorium, we face a situation where people in half the state are displaced after a hurricane and people in the other half of the state face being displaced during a raging pandemic,” he wrote in a letter to the governor.

“While I will continue fighting in Congress to extend the national moratorium, I hope you will do everything you can on the state level to protect Louisianans now,” Carter wrote.

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed two lawsuits against the national moratorium; one arguing the ban on evictions lacked statutory authority and another claiming the policy violated a constitutional separation of powers.

Wake said state-level emergency powers have the potential for similar overreach.

“In any event the real opportunity for abuse comes with orders that are issued on an indefinite or continuing basis, as we saw in many states through the pandemic,” Wake said. “That is why [Pacific Legal Foundation] has urged state legislatures to consider emergency management reforms to impose firm temporal limits on emergency powers as the best check against autocratic rule.”

NEW ORLEANS - East Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome met with U.S. Department of Housing and Development in New Orleans on Friday as the secretary toured several HUD housing complexes.

"Her and I have something in common. She used to be a mayor, so she understands how local government works," Mayor Broome said.

Mayor Broome and Secretary Marcia Fudge along with Senator John Kennedy and Congressman. Troy Carter served lunch for residents at the Guste Senior Housing Authority, a HUD-funded complex.

The HUD secretary also toured the The Westminster Towers in Kenner, another senior housing complex that was hit by Hurricane Ida. Residents had to evacuate because on the damage.

"It isn't just what I saw here, just even from the airport. Certainly you can see the remnants of all the damage, and I'm just really excited about the fact that I can help," Secretary Fudge said.

Mayor Broome also took the opportunity to talk with the HUD secretary about increasing federal housing dollars for the Capital Region and making better use of that funding.

"Basically, the theme is how we can maximize the dollars we get from HUD to make an impact in the Baton Rouge community," Broome said Mayor Broome and Secretary Fudge also met with Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards at the New Orleans East Hospital to promote COVID vaccine efforts.

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.