LOUISIANA FIFTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT MAP (graphic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
In light of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, next month’s U.S. House primaries in Louisiana are now suspended. Secretary of State Nancy Landry made the announcement this afternoon ahead of Governor Landry’s expected executive order. Landry said in a statement the state is barred from using the current congressional map that the Supreme Court has ruled an unconstitutional gerrymander. Political analyst Scott Hughes says with this suspension, the qualifying process will need to start all over again, since the districts will have changed and there are specific qualifying rules.
“One of which says you can qualify by petition. So you have to give someone so many months to go out and get signatures on a petition, so the clock becomes a huge issue,” Hughes explained.
Hughes says there are now only six months to hold an election essentially from square one, which could make a closed primary untenable.
“The closed primaries present a May 2nd problem. They have to run three rounds. And so, if there’s only two rounds, it’s no problem. If it’s just two rounds, they could say, ‘We’ll go November-December, the historical route, and we’ll be done,'” Hughes said.
Hughes says if the process is not completed by January 3rd, when the next Congress is sworn in, Louisiana would be left with no representation at all in the House, so it might be in the legislature’s best interest to scrap the closed primary for the U.S. House races.
“They would want to amend that and say, ‘We’re going to do these in open primaries in order to get the race done for this one cycle.’ I believe, since that was a legislative act, they would have that power to effectively waive their own rule for closed primaries,” Hughes noted.
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